User charges for education : the ability ans willingness to pay in Malawi

Investment in education is generally recognized to be essential for a country's long-term economic and social development. However, presentmacroeconomic conditions in many developing countries have obliged their governments to slow down increases in the allocation of public resources for education. As a result, the education sector is likely to develop only slowly, if at all; enrollment, already low in the poorer of the developing countries, would remain low, while the social demand for education would continue to be substantially unmet. In this setting, policy makers have recently focussed their attention on finding alternative sources of finance for education, one of which is the tapping …