Imagine you need to send a parcel from Balaka to Limbe urgently. You walk into the nearest Malawi Posts Corporation office, hand over your package, pay the required fee, and receive a receipt. You are told the parcel will be delivered. Ten days later—sometimes fifteen—your recipient is still waiting for it. No tracking. No accountability. No apology. The parcel will arrive when it arrives, or sometimes, it will not arrive at all. Now contrast that experience with a private courier operating under a performance-based contract. The parcel is collected within hours, tracked electronically, and delivered within forty-eight hours—because the courier's contract, and therefore their income, depends on it.
This contrast is not incidental. It is symptomatic of a structural reality that pervades Malawi's public sector: employees who are not bound by performance targets, renewal conditions, or the threat of contract termination have little institutional incentive to perform with urgency, precision, or accountability. Across healthcare, education, public administration, and infrastructure, the evidence is overwhelming—where permanent, non-contractual employment dominates, service delivery suffers. This paper argues that for Malawi to achieve effective, efficient, and quality public service delivery, a systematic and principled shift toward contract-based employment is not merely advisable but essential.
The Accountability Gap in Malawi's Permanent Public Service
Public sector employment in Malawi has historically been structured around permanence, seniority, and administrative tenure rather than performance and outcomes. The consequence is a culture where the relationship between effort and reward is fundamentally broken. Writing on bureaucratic dysfunction, Max Weber observed that modern bureaucracies, though designed for rational efficiency, become self-perpetuating systems in which rules serve the institution rather than its clients.
Consider a routine administrative scenario: a manager in a public institution is required to sign three forms to authorise a process—perhaps a procurement request, a leave approval, or a registration certificate. Under the current permanent-employment model, the manager may take more than a week to append their signature. There is no contractual consequence for delay. The salary arrives at the end of the month regardless. The citizen waits, the process stalls, and institutional trust erodes. This is not a caricature; it is the daily lived experience of Malawians seeking services from government offices in Lilongwe, Zomba, Mzuzu, and everywhere in between.
Governments that focus on results—that fund outcomes rather than inputs—transform the culture of their bureaucracies.
Osborne & Gaebler, Reinventing Government, 1992By contrast, when the same function is performed by an officer on a fixed-term, results-based contract, the calculus changes entirely. Contract renewal—and by extension, continued income—depends on demonstrable performance. Signing three forms within the required timeframe is not a favour; it is a contractual obligation. The incentive architecture of contract employment reintroduces the basic discipline that permanent tenure has eroded in the public sector.
Healthcare
The stakes of poor service delivery are nowhere higher than in healthcare. Malawi's public health system is chronically understaffed, and the staff who are present are not always where they matter. Absenteeism, late arrivals, and indifference to patient waiting times are documented features of many public health facilities. A 2019 study by the Malawi Health Equity Network found that patients at government hospitals in rural areas frequently waited more than four hours to see a clinician, and that absenteeism among clinical officers averaged between fifteen and twenty percent on any given day. These are not merely inconveniences; for a mother in obstructed labour or a child in a malaria crisis, delay is death.
The comparative evidence from contractual health workers is instructive. Malawi's experience with community health workers and health surveillance assistants deployed under performance-linked contracts through donor-supported programmes has demonstrated markedly higher attendance, more consistent outreach coverage, and measurable improvements in community health indicators. When a health worker knows that the renewal of their contract depends on the number of households visited, children vaccinated, and antenatal clients attended to, they attend, visit, and deliver.
Contract structures shape the expectations, incentives, and ultimately the behaviour of parties in ways that informal or permanent arrangements cannot replicate.
Oliver Hart, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2017Economist Oliver Hart, whose work on incomplete contracts won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2016, demonstrated that contracts are powerful not merely because of what they specify but because of the performance culture they create. In the context of Malawi's health service, this means that a contractually employed nurse who knows her quarterly review depends on patient outcomes is structurally more likely to provide quality care than a permanently employed counterpart facing no such accountability.
Education
Malawi's education sector presents another compelling case for the transformative power of contract-based employment. The problem of teacher absenteeism in government schools is well-documented and deeply entrenched. A survey by UNICEF found that in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Malawi, teacher absenteeism rates in public primary schools range from ten to thirty percent, with most of the absenteeism among permanent teachers enjoying lifetime tenure. The result is predictable: children sit in classrooms with no teacher, fall behind on curriculum, and ultimately disengage from education.
Private schools and non-governmental education institutions in Malawi, which predominantly employ teachers on fixed-term, renewable contracts, consistently outperform their government counterparts in national examinations. The 2023 Malawi National Examinations Board results revealed that eight of the top ten primary school leaving certificate performers were from private or faith-based institutions employing teachers on contractual terms. The argument is not that private schools are inherently superior but that the employment model they use creates the accountability structures that drive performance.
Education requires genuine engagement between teacher and student—a dialogical process that demands the physical and intellectual presence of the educator. That presence cannot be mandated into existence by permanent appointment; it must be incentivised through accountability structures.
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970Public Administration
Beyond healthcare and education, the argument for contract-based employment extends to the full breadth of public administration. Revenue collection, licensing, procurement, infrastructure maintenance, and social protection programmes all depend on public servants who deliver services on time, to standard, and with integrity. Under the current permanent-employment model, Malawi's public administration is characterised by what the African Development Bank has described as a 'performance deficit'—a systematic gap between what institutions are mandated to deliver and what they actually produce.
The introduction of contract-based arrangements in Malawi's public institutions has produced measurable improvements wherever it has been applied. The Presidential Initiative on Poverty Reduction and Nutrition, which engaged district nutrition officers on fixed-term performance contracts, reported a forty-percent improvement in community nutrition screening coverage within eighteen months of implementation. Similarly, road maintenance units operating under output-based contracts with the Road Fund Administration have consistently outperformed their civil-service equivalents in kilometres of road maintained per unit of expenditure. These are not anecdotes; they are evidence of a structural relationship between contractual accountability and service delivery quality.
The public sector is not incapable of excellence—it is structurally discouraged from it by systems that reward presence over performance.
Tony Blair, A Journey, 2010Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, reflecting on public sector reform, noted that the remedy is not more training, more resources, or more monitoring—though all of these matter. The foundational remedy is a restructuring of the employment relationship so that continued service is conditional on demonstrated performance.
Job Security and Union Concerns
Critics of contract-based employment in the public sector raise legitimate concerns. Trade unions and labour advocates argue that the removal of permanent tenure exposes workers to arbitrary dismissal, political manipulation, and economic insecurity. These concerns are not without merit. If contract employment is implemented without robust legal protections, transparent evaluation criteria, and independent review mechanisms, it can indeed become a tool of patronage or victimisation rather than a driver of performance.
However, these risks are risks of implementation, not risks of the model itself. Well-designed contract employment frameworks, such as those implemented in Rwanda's performance-based public service reform and Botswana's performance management system for civil servants, demonstrate that it is entirely possible to combine contractual accountability with strong worker protections, fair evaluation criteria, and genuine security of tenure for high performers. The goal is not to make public service precarious but to strengthen its accountability. A permanent contract with no performance review does not protect workers—it protects underperformance at the expense of citizens.
Malawi's own legal framework, through the Employment Act of 2000 and subsequent amendments, provides a sufficient foundation for the regulation of contract employment in the public sector. What is required is the political will to restructure employment terms, establish independent performance evaluation bodies, and ensure that contract renewal decisions are merit-based and transparent. This is a governance challenge, not an impossibility.
Conclusion
The parcel that sits undelivered for ten days in Balaka is not merely a postal failure. It is a symbol of a public service that has lost its foundational purpose: to serve. The manager who cannot find three minutes to sign three forms in a week has not failed as an individual; he has succeeded in adapting to a system that demands nothing of him. The teacher whose chair stands empty on a Monday morning has not abandoned her students out of malice; she has responded rationally to an employment arrangement that does not require her presence.
What gets measured gets managed.
Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management, 1954Contract-based employment operationalises this principle in the most consequential arena of public life: the delivery of services to citizens. When public servants know that their employment, their income, and their professional future depend on the quality and timeliness of what they deliver, they manage their performance. They arrive. They sign. They teach. They heal. They deliver.
