When School Becomes a Crisis Centre: Headteacher Leadership in Rural Malawi's Overlapping Emergencies

The school did not close when the floods came. It became something else entirely.

In districts like Mangochi, Machinga, and Phalombe in southern Malawi, rural Community Day Secondary Schools (CDSSs) occupy some of the only solid structures in their catchment areas. When Cyclone Freddy and successive flooding events displaced thousands of families across the region, local chiefs and the Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DoDMA) turned to those structures. School blocks became evacuation camps. Classrooms became sleeping quarters. Latrines built for a few hundred students absorbed the pressure of entire displaced communities.

The headteacher did not receive a crisis management manual. No policy assigned them this role. Yet within hours, they were partitioning school grounds to protect active classrooms from camp spaces, negotiating with the District Environmental Health Officer over sanitation risk, liaising with child protection workers to monitor dropout threats, and trying to keep Form Three students on track for national examinations scheduled months away.

This is not an exceptional story. It is a routine one.

Across rural Malawi, headteachers of CDSSs have become de facto emergency coordinators. They perform this role without formal recognition, without dedicated training, and without budget lines that acknowledge the work. They do it because no one else is positioned to do it, and because the consequences of not doing it fall directly on the learners in their care.

This article draws on documented cases and direct professional observation across Malawian secondary education to argue one thing: the international education in emergencies community has underinvested in the leadership layer closest to crisis. Headteachers in rural CDSSs are already doing the work. The question is how long that holds without support.

What the Evidence Shows

When Cyclone Freddy devastated Nsanje District in 2023, Makhanga CDSS was completely submerged. Floodwaters destroyed classrooms, laboratory equipment, textbooks, and stationery. The headteacher did not wait for central government deployment. They immediately coordinated with the Malawi Secondary School Headteachers Association and the South West Education Division to secure a K14 million recovery package. The headteacher then personally mapped the logistics needed to replace lost materials and get learners back on an academic track before the next examination cycle. The response was fast, targeted, and driven entirely by the headteacher's initiative and institutional connections.

That was crisis response. What happened at Kaphirimtiwa CDSS in Salima was something different: crisis anticipation.
Headteacher Brino Pindan recognised that repeated power outages and unlit walking routes during severe weather seasons were not merely inconveniences. They were safety threats. Students walking long distances through unlit terrain after dark faced real risk, and examination preparation was consistently disrupted by unreliable power. Pindan reframed the problem. Rather than requesting an educational resource, he argued to the Malawi Rural Electrification Program and the Ministry of Energy that reliable on-site power was an urgent safety and continuity mechanism. The argument worked. Kaphirimtiwa secured direct grid installation, protecting over 1,200 connected households and the school's student body from preventable harm.

Neither of these headteachers was following a prescribed emergency protocol. Both were exercising judgment that no training programme had formally equipped them for.

The classrooms-turned-camps scenario, common across Mangochi, Machinga, and Phalombe, adds a further dimension: sustained, simultaneous management of humanitarian and educational functions. A headteacher in this situation is not responding to a crisis and then returning to school leadership. They are doing both at once, often for weeks. They zone the campus. They manage sanitation. They track child protection risks. They maintain teacher morale. They communicate with parents who do not know whether school is open or not. And they do all of this while remaining, officially, a school administrator with no emergency mandate, no emergency budget, and no emergency support structure.

Comparable patterns have been documented elsewhere. A 2025 qualitative study of primary schools in flood-affected Lakshmipur, Bangladesh found that headteachers similarly converted schools into community shelters, sourced aid through personal networks, and provided informal psychosocial support, all without formal disaster preparedness training. The study found that the education office's tardiness in providing assistance exposed a structural weakness in institutional readiness, while local headteacher initiative filled the gap. Malawi's rural CDSSs present the same structural weakness, compounded by the fact that the crises do not arrive one at a time.

Cyclone Freddy was followed by cholera. Cholera closures overlapped with food insecurity. Food insecurity affected attendance during examination periods. Each disruption interacted with the others. The headteacher absorbed every interaction.

The Gap and What Would Close It

The gap is not a lack of capable headteachers. The gap is a system that relies on their capability without investing in it.
Malawi's 2018 Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Framework for Teachers and Teacher Educators, the governing policy document for headteacher professional development, contains no reference to emergency response, crisis coordination, or educational continuity under disaster conditions. The framework defines eight core teaching competencies covering content mastery, lesson planning, teaching methods, communication, student diversity, assessment, policy understanding, and professional self-development. Not one addresses what a headteacher should do when floodwaters enter the school compound. The words 'emergency,' 'crisis,' 'disaster,' and 'resilience' do not appear anywhere in the document.

The headteacher role is defined explicitly in the framework: promote CPD participation, maintain teacher portfolios, link professional development to school improvement plans, and monitor teacher practice. Emergency coordination does not appear. The framework was published in 2018. Cyclone Freddy struck in 2023. No revision has addressed the gap. The absence is not a planning oversight from before the crises came. It persists after them.

Three specific changes would address this directly.

• Integrate crisis leadership into the existing CPD pathway for secondary school headteachers. This does not require a new system. Malawi already has a continuing professional development structure for school leaders. One dedicated in-service module per year, covering emergency coordination, community liaison, and educational continuity planning, would cost a fraction of what post-disaster recovery programming costs after the fact. The Makhanga case alone, requiring a K14 million recovery package, illustrates what is at stake when schools are not prepared in advance.
• Formally recognise the emergency coordinator role that headteachers already perform. School improvement plans should include a crisis preparedness component, with the headteacher named as the responsible officer. Emergency response frameworks maintained by DoDMA and district councils should explicitly include CDSSs and their headteachers as coordination nodes, not as passive recipients of relief. 
• Establish a dedicated emergency education fund accessible at school level. Headteacher Brino Pindan at Kaphirimtiwa secured grid installation by making the right argument to the right ministry. Most headteachers in crisis do not have that option. They need small, accessible budgets for immediate needs: transport to reach displaced students, cleaning supplies after flooding, temporary sanitation, communication costs. These are not large sums. They are the difference between a school that functions during a crisis and one that loses a generation of learners to dropout.

None of these recommendations require new institutions. They require existing institutions to acknowledge what is already happening and resource it accordingly. 

Donors funding education in emergencies programming in Malawi are currently relying on headteacher initiative as a free input. That initiative is real, as the cases in this article demonstrate. But it is not guaranteed, it is not sustainable without support, and it is not equitably distributed. Headteachers in better-connected districts with stronger personal networks and more experienced leaders will manage. Those in the most remote and resource-constrained CDSSs, where crises hit hardest, are most likely to be overwhelmed precisely when their communities need them most.
That is the investment case. Support the leadership layer that is already holding the system together, before it breaks.

Conclusion

Malawi's rural CDSSs will face more crises. Climate projections for southern Africa point toward more frequent and more severe flooding events. Cholera remains endemic in districts where water and sanitation infrastructure is weakest. Economic shocks driven by currency depreciation and food price volatility will continue to pull learners out of school. These are not hypothetical risks. They are the operating conditions that CDSS headteachers already navigate.
The international education in emergencies community has developed sophisticated frameworks for understanding what schools need during crises: safe learning environments, psychosocial support, continuity of curriculum, community engagement. What those frameworks have been slower to address is who, at the school level, is responsible for delivering all of those things simultaneously, with no training, no budget, and no formal mandate to do so. In Malawi, that person is the headteacher.

The cases documented here do not describe exceptional individuals. They describe a systemic expectation that has never been made explicit. Headteachers are expected to hold schools together when everything else breaks down. The system counts on it. It simply does not say so, prepare for it, or pay for it.

Malawi's headteachers are already doing the work. The question for donors, policymakers, and the education in emergencies community is straightforward: how much longer will you ask them to do it alone?

About the Author

Steven Bwanali is Head of the Department of Education at Lake Malawi Anglican University in Lilongwe, Malawi. He has over 19 years of experience across secondary education, teacher training, NGO programme management, and university leadership.

References

Hamid, K. S., & Hasanuzzaman, K. M. (2025). Navigating crisis with courage: Leadership of head teachers in flood-affected communities of Lakshmipur, Bangladesh. Social Sciences and Education Research Review, 12(1), 371-377. https://sserr.ro/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/sserr-12-1-371-377.pdf

Malawi Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. (2018). Continuing Professional Development Framework for Teachers and Teacher Educators. Government of Malawi.

UNICEF Malawi. (2024). How the COVID-19 vaccine renewed hope for learners in Malawi. https://www.unicef.org/malawi/stories/how-covid-19-vaccine-renewed-hope-learners-malawi

Malawi Schools Trust. (n.d.). Education in Malawi. https://malawischoolstrust.org/about/education-in-malawi/

Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies. (2010). Minimum Standards for Education: Preparedness, response, recovery. ERIC Clearinghouse.