Parallels in Urban Education in the United States and Malawi
Disrupting the Myth of a Rural-Urban Dichotomy in Malawi
As international researchers, policymakers, and development staff, we rely on data indicators to simplify the populations we work with to target initiatives for the greatest possible impact. Ethnic, gender, and income-based goals can help development workers target the communities where the most significant needs are. "Rural" and "urban" when used as mutually exclusive, however, do not offer the clarity and specificity we seek. Instead, these terms paint gross misrepresentations that allow for misallocated funds and inappropriate policy.
In the United States, "urban" is often a euphemism for black and poor, particularly when discussing schools. The development world utilizes "rural" in a similar way to conjure images of inaccessible villages where residents have little to no access to markets or trade and march for hours every day to transport water. To be clear, there are places where this is true, but they are only a small portion of what we currently label "rural." Utilizing this loaded language hides the varying levels of economy and access present in the "rural" world. It is as much a disservice in development work as it is in educational research ("urban" in American education here, here, and here).
Consider the above image of Malawi. The pinned cities of Mzuzu, Lilongwe, Zomba, and Blantyre are the only official urban centers the Government of Malawi acknowledges. Roughly, 2 million people in a nation of over 16 million. With the numbers stacked as such, country-level analysis using urban/rural disaggregation can easily find vast inequalities that are more a function of the categories than accurate reflections of reality.
Above, the 28 administrative districts of Malawi are mapped. In Malawi, "urban" does not carry the racial, economic, or social burdens the term does in the United States. For Malawians, official urban centers are the only locations where government offices for drivers licenses, passports, permits, and registrations can be obtained. It is where the government and politics are present and at play.
While only 17% of the population is "urbanized," those four cities benefit from 53% of overall public education expenditure—a statement that can mean next to nothing without the context that "urban" in Malawi is just four cities. Analysis of educational outcomes as urban or rural is next to instinctive in development work but it does not reveal the full picture. The unbalanced nature of a rural/urban dichotomy is explicit in Kendall's analysis on the effects of Free Primary Education in Malawi from the regional perspective instead of the urban/rural binary. In essence, FPE varies far more region to region, than it does on the binary. A more publicly known example of government manipulation of the urban/rural divide is visible in the 2010 Hardship Allowances meant to attract qualified teachers to "rural" areas. At face, this is a sound and noble policy; in reality, over 90% of Malawian schools are classified as rural and the small allowances were more a ploy to gain votes and political favor from the nation's large teaching staff than to effect change in the nation's most remote villages.
Most readers will have heard somewhere that by 2030, over half of the world's population will be urbanized, with most of the growth in Africa and Asia. To be clear, there is no universal definition of what exactly "urban" means. The UN Population Division published a list of how 232 countries define the term for use in censuses, noting variations in use of population minimums, weights of population density, economic indicators, and levels of infrastructure. The World Bank and United Nations are working on standardizing the definition as the current differences pose a challenge for monitoring Sustainable Development Goal 11: To make cities safe, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable. But it is still unclear how this standardization will be implemented and monitored on a global scale.
At 17.7% Malawi has the lowest urbanization rate in Sub-Saharan Africa and amongst other members of the South African Development Community which are urbanized at 37.9% and 35.9% respectively. These numbers exclude the numerous peri-urban centers in Malawi that contribute to the nation's standing as one of the most densely populated countries in Africa. While peri-urban centers still suffer from limited government interaction, their exclusion from urban/rural analysis limits researchers' ability to fully quantify how education is effected or obtained in peri-urban centers and how policy might adopt to areas that disrupt the rural/urban dichotomy.
Can international development achieve full impact where the imagined "urban" and "rural" dichotomy still holds extreme implications for funding allocations and research considerations? Until more stable measures for urban and rural are adopted and recognized, decisions that fail to incorporate the peri-urban reality should no longer be the aim of development work. A peri-urban category should be institutionalized to accommodate populations that are not currently represented.