What girls in Malawi gain – and give up – by choosing education

In July 2005, I traveled a thoroughfare in Lilongwe, Malawi, past chicken farms, and then took dirt roads into Bowa village. Our SUV rocked side to side over the pocked roads, constantly sending my hand up to the grab bar. We passed pairs of schoolgirls in blue dresses that brightened the landscape of earth and sky. 

Malawi is a largely rural country in southeastern Africa, known for rich traditions, strong community ties, and natural beauty. The economy is growing, and life expectancy has leaped over the past two decades to over 65 years. Still, more than half of its roughly 20 million people live in poverty. Yet despite facing challenges, Malawi is affectionately known as “the warm heart of Africa.”

That summer I was an intern with CARE, a global organization fighting poverty and injustice. I was evaluating the impact of CARE programs in villages like Bowa. There, I met Selina and Anesi Bonefesi. Their story changed my life and many others. 

An entrepreneurial farmer, Selina talked right into me, as if we didn’t need a translator. With a loan from CARE, she’d started a business selling tasty bites of fried dough to passersby. The income was a welcome supplement to what she and her husband earned from growing tobacco. Still, they did not make enough to pay the $200 needed for Selina’s 14-year-old stepdaughter, Anesi, to finish primary school. 

With an expected household income of $463 that year, they had prioritized their son in 11th grade, whom they deemed more likely to find employment.

Then, one day after returning to Lilongwe from one of the villages, I got an unexpected call from The Christian Science Monitor. The editors wanted an article about a family in Africa living on less than $1 a day per person, a figure widely used to signal poverty. It would run during the G8 summit in Scotland, where world leaders ultimately decided to forgive billions of dollars of international debt for countries like Malawi.  

I knew immediately that I would write about Selina and her family. 

The day after the article was published, my editor forwarded email after email from Monitor readers who wanted to help. “What I would like to know specifically is what would it take for Mrs. Bonefesi’s daughter to return to school?” wrote one reader.

Donations began pouring in. 

My colleagues at CARE warned me that giving cash directly to the Bonefesi family could make it a target of jealousy or even witchcraft. Instead, the chief in Bowa suggested that we help all six girls in the village who, like Anesi, had made it at least as far as eighth grade. And so we did, using the $6,000 Monitor readers initially contributed, which would be enough to see them through the local secondary school. 

A group of women from Bowa agreed to oversee the funds. When I asked them what the initiative should be called, they answered, “Advancing Girls’ Education!” 

Within months, my first nonprofit – Advancing Girls’ Education in Africa (AGE Africa) – launched with the partnership of Malawian colleagues and seven other students from my graduate program at The Fletcher School at Tufts University near Boston.

A year later, I began my doctoral studies at Fletcher, with a focus on education in Africa. Monitor readers continued to donate to our nascent fundraising efforts, which allowed us to hire our first staff member. I continued visiting Malawi and chaired AGE Africa’s board. Over time, with support from our executive director, our Malawian country directors shaped and grew the program. 

After nine years, in 2014, I recruited my successor, stepped away from the program entirely, and moved with my young family to Turkey to start a new chapter. I was proud to leave AGE Africa in the hands of colleagues who considered the mission their own. 

In Turkey, I co-founded The Fuller Project, a global newsroom whose coverage seeks to effect positive change for women. The women leaders I know in Malawi, whose stories are rarely heard, were my inspiration. 

Back in the United States, seven years after launching the newsroom, I finally got to visit Malawi again in 2022. I already knew from my time with AGE Africa that schooling not only offered opportunities but also created challenges in the girls’ lives. I wanted to know how they were doing and how education had helped – or hadn’t.

Anesi: Choosing to belong

Back in 2006, during the Bowa girls’ first term, the Monitor’s Africa correspondent visited to see how they were faring. “The scholarship is opening new worlds,” he wrote. They had ample time to study, a break from hard labor in the fields, and full bellies during a time of hunger at home. Alifosina Chilembwe wanted to be a lawyer, and Efelo Sekani wanted to be a doctor. 

About Anesi, he wrote, “All has not gone according to plan.” 

Anesi had received a marriage proposal from a boy who had given her a new skirt and lotion. Her friends were all getting married, and her grandmother pressured her to accept. But her father convinced her to wait, and so Anesi resolved to finish the school year.  

During that year, I visited. Anesi greeted me in front of her school wearing a white dress and a self-assured smile. Her headmaster told me she was “well behaved” and “improving.”

But in a schoolroom of 100, and without textbooks, she and her peers strained to follow the teacher. Instruction was in English, and Anesi had minimal comprehension, having had little exposure to it in Bowa. She also had no role models to show her what kind of doors education could open.

Meanwhile, the boy offered her a chance to stay with her peers in the familiar world of village life. At the end of the school year, she accepted his proposal.

I felt overcome with regret that AGE Africa couldn’t keep open the door to education for her. But we hadn’t yet learned how best to help. Paying secondary school fees was just a first step. We still had to understand the complex and layered barriers that girls face, and our role in supporting their growth.

When I go to see Anesi in 2022, I stop first at the chief’s house. He remembers me and my habit of scribbling notes.

The chief tells me that nothing has really changed since my last visit. “There are secondary schools now, so the youth graduate, but we have no access to jobs, so they return to their same subsistence farming life,” he says. Five of the six original AGE Africa scholars still live in the village. 

He then calls Anesi on her cellphone, and she approaches us moments later with a wide smile. She walks with her head back and chest forward, exuding the authority gained from motherhood. She was 31 years old at the time, and had a 12-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son. So did I.

She is happy with her husband, but their life has been one of hardship. Once, they tried to move away to a different village, but there was a bad harvest and soon they were back. Now, they live in the same compound where Anesi was born. Her father lives next door and has remarried. Selina left the village years ago. Their homes, mortared with mud and topped with straw, are vulnerable to rain. 

Anesi’s daughter has fallen a year behind in school. During one particularly dry year, the tobacco yield was poor, and they couldn’t afford to send her. Tobacco, the main export crop since colonization, strips the land of nutrients and is sensitive to drought. Money for farming inputs, like fertilizer, is scarce, and it’s hard to get ahead. 

Of her marriage proposal, Anesi says, “I accepted, but in a childish way, and I have felt ashamed my entire life. 

“I have often wondered how different my life would be if I had continued my education,” Anesi tells me.  

I ask myself the same question. 

Idah: From Malawi to Exeter and back

After the first year of AGE Africa, we revamped the program, moving the girls into boarding schools so they would have better support, supervision, and resources. We also gave scholarships to 12 more girls, including Idah Savala.

Idah is one of eight siblings born to a widowed mother in a rural village. Her confident grin and top grades foreshadowed greatness. From a young age, she excelled academically, winning a primary school scholarship.

Idah was then selected to attend Providence Secondary School for Girls, one of the most competitive schools in the country. She and her mother went door to door, asking for help with the school fees. When it seemed like all options were exhausted, Idah collapsed in tears. AGE Africa heard about her situation and awarded her a scholarship.  

When I visited her on campus in 2007, she was waking up each day at 3:30 a.m. to wash, cook, and study before school. “It’s what you do in Malawi to get ahead,” she told me. 

At school, she exceeded expectations. At home during school breaks, it was more difficult. Her arms had grown too weak to pound maize into meal. “I have nothing in common with the girls, and I’m not allowed to talk to the boys about the things that interest me, like maths,” she said. The hardest time of her life, she later told me, was when she finished secondary school and had to go back to the village to wait more than a year for her exam results. At home with no work, no husband, and no news of university acceptance, she endured taunts and condemnation. As was true for Anesi, choosing education came at a cost. But Idah could more clearly see the benefits. 

Back in the U.S. after that visit, I told a donor about Idah’s perseverance. He’d attended Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite prep school in New Hampshire, and wanted her to experience it.

Months later, Idah, who had never left southern Malawi, boarded a plane to New Hampshire to attend summer school at Exeter, funded by the donor. She sampled American life, from ice skating to cafeteria food to the school dance. She also saw open water for the first time. 

“You guys didn’t prepare me!” she told me. The library system was different. The classrooms, built around small, round tables, forced every student into full participation. She didn’t have plentiful clothing like the other kids, and she sorely missed Malawian food. 

The summer tested her fortitude but also enriched her. Idah flew home, suitcase and heightened ambition in tow. From the airport, she took a minibus to her village. The man next to her chided her, calling her a prostitute. He disapproved of her nail polish, still fresh from the school dance. 

But her improved study skills would later help her beat the odds and get into Chancellor College, where students also wear nail polish. 

Idah is the only AGE Africa scholar to experience Exeter. Though she thrived, we decided to keep the organization’s efforts focused in Malawi.

When I saw Idah in 2014, she was a university student and a community development intern. We went together to visit AGE Africa scholars, who swarmed her, wanting advice. She encouraged them, saying, “I was once like you.” 

When I visit Idah in 2022, she proudly pulls back the iron gate of her house in Lilongwe. Evenings and weekends, she is usually at her master’s program in strategic management, but today she has the day off, and we lounge on her couch for hours. She is 28 years old and pregnant, preparing for motherhood.

Later, she takes me to the international nonprofit where she works, which provides sexual and reproductive health education and services. 

Her son, Jermone, was born in March. All her life, Idah has balanced her educational ambition and others’ expectations. Now, she balances motherhood and her passion for mentoring girls in rural villages like her own. 

Lessenia: Setting a different example

On one of my last days in Malawi, AGE Africa Country Director Ulanda Mtamba picks me up from Lilongwe to go to Mchinji, near the Zambian border. As we drive past vegetable stands and bicyclists pushing towers of grain, she brings me up to speed on the ways she is expanding the program.

We pull up to a small yellow building, and Lessenia Chikho, the newly appointed central district officer for AGE Africa, gives us a hero’s welcome. With excitement, she shows us her office and stacks of scholar records. Never mind that there is no working bathroom or outhouse just yet; she runs home when needed.

Lessenia grew up as one of nine siblings in Dedza District, by the Mozambican border. Her father, Rafael, was a truck driver, sometimes traveling as far as South Africa before returning home.

He had three days off between trips to rest under the care of his wife and amid the din of their children. Lessenia went to bed with a stomach full of maize, vegetables, and meat. “We used to live a better life, a good one,” she tells me. 

Then her dad died, and everything changed. She moved from a large house in the village to an unfinished one in a township. Her mother, Alice Chikho Balaka, bundled tomatoes on her head to sell at the roadside, and deputized the siblings to tend to each other in a cascading chain of care. Ms. Balaka never married again. “You sisters are growing too old to have a stepfather around,” she told Lessenia. 

Male relatives encouraged Ms. Balaka to look for marriages for the girls, but she refused, vowing to provide for them herself. Some nights the children piled into shared beds, their stomachs thrumming up a chorus of hunger. But their mother’s iron will prevailed when it came to education: She succeeded in putting each child through secondary school.

Having left her home behind when her father died, Lessenia learned to keep her own company. “Most of the times I was alone, sitting and practicing my schoolwork,” she tells me. Occasionally, she comforted her mother. “Sometimes I’d talk to her like a big girl, telling her, ‘Don’t worry, Mami; the future is bright!’”

Back in 2008, after taking her primary school exit exams, Lessenia was at home in bed, feeling ill. Her uncle, who worked in the district education department, called to tell Ms. Balaka that Lessenia had been selected for a national boarding school in Mangochi, the highest possible honor for a student. Telling the story 15 years later, Lessenia breaks into peals of laughter. “I was sick, and then I was fine! I’m still shocked. How did I get healed just by hearing this?” 

Ms. Balaka was elated – and in despair. How would she pay for it? She would have to send Lessenia with food and pocket money, not to mention uniforms and books, all of which she had to come up with in just two weeks. As the deadline approached, Lessenia began to despair, too. 

Comforting her crying daughter, Ms. Balaka promised her, “God will provide.” Then she sold half of the plot of land under their small home and bought bus tickets to Mangochi.

After the first term, when Lessenia returned for break, she realized her mom was short on funds again. By the time she scraped together the money, Lessenia was two weeks late returning to school. A teacher recommended her for an AGE Africa scholarship, which she was awarded. “That day I went straight to admissions to ask them to call my mom, and she couldn’t believe it,” says Lessenia. She’d get through school on her grades now, not her mother’s sweat and sacrifice. 

Back at home after finishing the first year of secondary school, Lessenia says her mom told her, “Your bones are showing out!” She’d been working so hard that she’d lost weight, and the girls at home noticed.

“Sometimes people do not want to associate with you just because you look different from them, ... which makes one have few friends,” Lessenia says. But she didn’t pay them any mind. She says she was always on her own reading anyway.

After secondary school, Lessenia attended Chancellor College, the same prestigious government-run school that Idah went to. She also interned for AGE Africa. 

Lessenia graduated from university in 2018 and went on to jobs as a teacher, economist, and development facilitator. She’s now 28 years old and married, and has two children, a boy and a girl, ages 1 and 5. When the opportunity arose to be district officer for AGE Africa, she jumped at the chance. “It’s all about the values and how you feel after doing the thing,” she says. 

By early afternoon, Lessenia’s husband, Brian, arrives to help drive us to Ludzi Secondary School for Girls to see AGE Africa’s peer mentoring program in action. They moved to Mchinji for Lessenia’s job. Brian works in the import-export industry, as Lessenia’s father did, but as an accountant. 

When we arrive at Ludzi Secondary School, the head teacher escorts us to our seats to watch the performance that Lessenia and the girls have prepared during their mentoring sessions. 

Lessenia, wearing a gold and black taffeta dress, revs the girls’ energy as if she were the captain of a cheer squad. “Who are the leaders of tomorrow?” she booms. 

“We are!” the girls shout back. Then one of the older girls takes over as emcee with charisma and confidence, transitioning between call and response, songs, and plays about how to confront obstacles.

I ask Lessenia what she advises girls who are thinking about marriage. “I talk to them about their careers, not about men!” she answers. If she had to advise them, she says, “I would say, marry your best friend ... a person who respects you.”

On the way back, I ask Lessenia how she deals with criticism for being different.

“People expect a lot from you just because they consider you as a hero and well educated, and as such, doing the best is the only option,” she says. “One has to be cautious always when doing things because you are considered a star in the community. ... It just helps you to think creatively and critically before doing anything.”

That pressure doesn’t appear to have clipped her wings. “I love solving problems!” she says about her plan to get a master’s degree in economics. “Nothing can stop me!”

Measurable progress

Over the years, Malawian leaders on AGE Africa’s staff deepened their focus on developing girls’ agency, not just knowledge and skills. The team launched Creating Healthy Approaches to Success (CHATS), a peer mentoring curriculum that builds girls’ confidence through role play and acting. Today, CHATS serves 4,500 girls directly and reaches 4 million girls through radio programming, which started as an emergency response during the pandemic. 

Since 2005, AGE Africa has provided 500 four-year, secondary school scholarships to girls, with 138 currently enrolled. Recently, the program also began offering some higher education scholarships and now supports 52 students in universities, nursing schools, and technical academies. Nearly every scholarship recipient graduates. 

At annual regional retreats, the scholars hear from professional women, like Idah and Lessenia, and build both peer and mentor networks. The girls often say “thank you” to the staff, but they are the ones doing the hardest work. 

“I couldn’t understand why you left AGE Africa! You didn’t even stay on the board!” Lessenia remarks to me on WhatsApp once I’m back home in Washington. 

“I left, but also, I did not leave. I’ve spent my life working for women and girls, just like you,” I tell her, noting that we are driven by a shared sense of purpose.

AGE Africa opened doors, she says, but then adds, “You know, I’m a catalyst of change.”