On 1st December last year just like any other 1st December the whole world was commemorating the deadly pandemic HIV/Aids and there were different gatherings tackling many issues regarding this global tragedy.
Currently, the whole world is facing a painful reality of the devastating effects of this human calamity. And since the theme for last year’s commemoration was “Universal Access and Human Rights” it was very alluring to focus only on areas that appeared to be “closely related” to this theme, ignoring other equally significant areas which the pandemic has not spared.
In essence, World AIDS Day was first commemorated on 1st December 1988. Among other things it involved and continues involving raising money, increasing awareness, fighting prejudice and improving education. This day is quite vital as long as reminding people that the impacts of the pandemic are still raveling is concerned.
Sometime back the international media reported that global leaders had pledged to work towards universal access to HIV/Aids treatment, prevention and care; recognising these as fundamental human rights. In Malawi, to a greater extent, some exclusive progress has been made in increasing access to HIV/Aids services, yet greater commitment is still needed in areas to do with human rights.
That is why sometime back, Vice President honourable Joyce Banda pointed out that if stigma and discrimination are not clearly scrutinized, many infected people will not come out in the open to disclose their status and thus, live traumatized lives.
It is a foregone conclusion that as this deadly pandemic continues claiming a substantial number of lives worldwide, the consequences are affecting different sectors of the society and one of these sectors, arguably, is education.
Education is basically taken as the basis of every country’s development and by implication, it is obvious that a crippled education system will demoralize the development of the country.
Children lose their parents to the pandemic, or they may just have their parents infected; the children themselves may be infected; teachers and other officials in the education sector are affected; at the household level, the impact is just too high; and the overriding impact is the reduction of human capital, which is at the centre of any kind of development.
“Of all the sectors, education is the worst affected by HIV/Aids, and Malawi continues losing teachers to this pandemic. That is why a course on HIV/Aids has been incorporated into teaching curriculums in all levels of education,” said a member of the Teachers Union of Malawi (TUM) sometime back.
Above all areas, it is at the household and community level where the consequences of the HIV/Aids pandemic are fully felt. It precipitates poverty; and generally poor people are educationally disadvantaged.
Across Malawi, it has been observed that the classes of people that are most vulnerable are those that are the most economically well-off. And as they die, families are left with struggles galore and poverty finally overtakes them, thereby failing to educate the children. If they are still alive (but sick) concentration on the education of children is lessened as the attention is shifted from everything to them.
In other instances, when parents die, there is usually the mismanagement of finances by those in whom the welfare of the orphans has been entrusted, ultimately resulting in the orphans failing to acquire the kind of education they would be able to if their parents were alive. This again is a human rights issue, and to a certain extent, it is being sufficiently tackled by concerned stakeholders.
Aids also destroys human capital in the education sector just as it does in any other sector. People’s accumulated experiences, skills and knowledge built over a period of years are destroyed because their efficiency does not remain the same after they have been attacked by the pandemic, even before their death.
“HIV/Aids patients have reduced productivity and therefore need to take care of themselves in every way feasible so that they balance the efficiency of their bodies,” reads a report published by the Dalcon Medical Journal.
Though there are other things that affect education, it may be reasonable to theorise that much as HIV/Aids is not suitably put in the limelight when addressing issues of low education standards in Malawi, the pandemic at present poses the greatest challenge to sustained quality education whose virtues attached stakeholders are always extolling. Educationists point out that the structural implications of HIV related mortality on teachers and other civil servants in the education sector are projected to be very severe.
A number of studies have been carried out using HIV prevalence rates and other demographic and epidemiological data in a number of countries, including Malawi, to project the future of the pandemic and one of the conclusions of the studies is that during the projection period of 2003 to 2011, with Aids still rocking the education sector, there would be a demand to train 60 percent more teachers.
And the question is: which institutions would be used in the process if the ones that are already there are already incapable of achieving the needed requirement. Or perhaps, our last hope should be in the five universities to be built sooner or later.
The education sector is unlike many other sectors, though it finds company with others like the health sector. It has to remain functional irrespective of the human hours lost to absenteeism and death.
For instance, estimates on the impact of the pandemic on the public sector in Malawi show that vacancy levels in government ministries continue rising more especially in the Ministry of Education. This generally poses the challenge of how the ministry can remain competently functional in the face of this human resource gap, yet there is no option on the part of the ministry other than to continue training Malawians with the few human resource available.
Well, even though HIV/Aids was discovered many years ago, it appears in Malawi, it is only now that it has caught us napping. But we cannot sit down, fold our arms and wait for “come what may”. There is need for government and stakeholders to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on education.
The challenge for government and all those involved in the education sector is to provide the required data, help consolidate the design and implementation of policies and programmes that can help deal with the pandemic in order to sustain the required quality education for all Malawians.
To another extent, it appears the way we understand how HIV/Aids is affecting educational provision in Malawi is generally poor, even by those who seem to be directly “absorbed” in the education sector.
There is a need that educationists and other concerned stakeholders acquire adequate knowledge base which can make a tangible difference in schools and other educational institutions. Otherwise, our fight against HIV/Aids so as to create a conducive education environment appears to be struggling.
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