Government says caregivers working in Early Childhood Development (ECD) centres will be put on government payroll after the Malawi economy stabilises.
Director of child affairs in the ministry of gender, community development and social welfare McKnight Kalanda made the remarks on Friday April 29, 2022 during graduation ceremony for 50 caregivers which was held at Blantyre Early Childhood Development Training Center.
Kalanda indicated that caregivers are so crucial in as far as early childhood education is concerned and said the training will help them to excellently deliver in their jurisdictions.
“One of the major issues for the caregivers is to motivate them and training is one way of doing so, but also through other interventions like village savings and loan association scheme and on top, we are looking forward to a day when a caregiver would be on government payroll subject to the Malawi economy recovering as projected by government,” said Kalanda.
However, the Director encouraged all caregivers in the country to further their education claiming only those with MSCE certificates or equivalent to that, will be eligible for inclusion on government’s payroll.
Malawi has over 60,000 caregivers and of the population, only 19,000 are fully trained. Government will this year train over 1000 caregivers across the country.
The caregivers who received certificates are from Traditional Authority Mazengera and Chitekwere in Lilongwe and they have been at the training centre for two weeks where they were being skilled on how they can excellently provide early childhood education to kids in their respective areas.
In an interview after the graduation ceremony, Harold Munthali who is World Vision Malawi’s district manager for Lilongwe said they thought of hosting this training so as to provide a better understanding of what surrounds early childhood education and caregiving.
Munthali said it is World Vision’s desire to complement government’s efforts on promoting education, particularly in early childhood stage and further asked for concerted efforts saying government alone can never do it all.
“As World Vision, we would want children to enjoy life in its fullness and to achieve this one of the areas we are working on is on literacy, but we realize that for children to perform well, for them to be able to read, it all starts with the foundation they get, that is why we have invested in this training where we have trained 50 caregivers.
“We will continue to invest in early childhood developments and it is also our plea that we all join hands to ensure that we invest together in early childhood development which is the foundation for educated and productive citizens in future,” said Munthali.
