Malawi has a young population. The median age of the population is 17 years (NSO,
2009). Owing to the youthful nature of its population, the need to create current and future
employment is at the heart of its development policies. Malawi has a number of policies
and programmes that seek to tackle youth unemployment. These policies include the
Malawi Growth and Development Strategy, the National Employment Policy, the National
Youth Policy, and the Malawi Decent Work Country Programme. As part of the objective
of solving the youth employment challenges in Malawi, these policies aim to improve the
transitions of youth from school to work.
Despite recognition by various employment-related policies of the importance of
improving school-to-work transitions, existing labour market information in Malawi
cannot adequately answer the question of why the school-to-work transitions of young
people are a long and difficult process.2
Answering this question would go a long way in
improving the existing employment strategies to better deal with problems that the youth
face as they transition from school to work. Recognizing this information gap, the ILO
undertook two complementary surveys in Malawi, namely, the school-to-work transition
survey (SWTS) and the labour demand enterprise survey (LDES). The SWTS covered
young people between the ages of 15 and 29 and aims to generate information on the
current labour market situation, the history of economic activities and the perceptions and
aspirations of youth. The LDES then complements the supply-side picture provided by the
SWTS by looking at the current and expected workforce needs of enterprises and the
perspectives of managers on the pool of available young jobseekers and workers. In
Malawi, the SWTS was commissioned in June 2012 and targeted 3,100 youth. The LDES
targeted 800 enterprises. This report presents the findings from these two surveys.