Director of the Civil Society Education Coalition (CSEC), Benedicto Kondowe calls for government’s effort in provision of good facilities and a science-friendly environment in secondary schools to help alleviate poor results in sciences.

This has been said barely a week after the Malawi National Examinations Board (MANEB) released this year’s Malawi School Certificate of Education (MSCE) examination results.

In this year’s exams, students have performed poorly in science subjects, some to the extent of getting zeros, though the overall pass rate in the released exams has increased from last year’s 61.66 percent to 63.23 percent.

Kondowe said the poor performance in sciences has happened just because of either poor teaching or learning in schools and insufficiency of laboratories in some schools.

“The poor results in sciences only indicate that either teaching or learning of science subjects has been problematic and we know that government is implementing science oriented secondary school curriculum, yet the schools are not provided with requisite inputs which would competently allow the students to deliver. So whether you talk about laboratories they are not even there, you talk about adequacy of text books, this has been a major issue, teacher’s guides have also been in short supply,” he sympathised.

Science subjects are meant to be taught more practically for students to easily grasp what teachers are teaching.

He further said that science is not being taught as it must be handled by teachers in schools, hence the poor results.

“The preconditions to teach science subjects have not been well catered for. I think learners are not taught science as it ought to be, hence the poor results, and that’s why when you look at numbers of students getting zeros, even on subjects like geography, agriculture, physical science, mathematics, it is quite incredible because ordinarily how poor or dull a student is you at least expect a student to get a single or two questions right, it hasn’t happened that way yet these are the students who have been learning for the entire academic year,” Kondowe said

Kondowe also said the situation should serve as a wake-up call for government, and said as a country we need to do something about it.