The comment from my daughter that led to a charity to help children in Malawi

Scotland as a nation has always had an international view: historical links with Scandinavia and Ireland, the Auld Alliance with France, a later political link with England and in recent times we have linked with Europe, which saw thousands of Poles and others make a positive impact in our society.

Scots have travelled far and wide, seeding the world in every corner with ideas, inventions and tales of home. But now we are increasingly seeing the emergence of a “new alliance” between Scotland and one of Africa’s smallest and poorest countries.

The Scotland Malawi partnership survey has found that 46% of Scots “can name a friend or family member with a connection to Malawi”, and 109,000 Scots and 208,000 Malawians are actively involved in community-led partnerships between our two nations. This has made Scotland’s links with Malawi one of the strongest north-south, people-to-people links in the world, with a thousand plus members of the Scotland Malawi partnership contributing £49 million of activity to support this new alliance.

There have been religious links between our two countries for 161 years, since

David Livingstone and others embarked on missions to find the source of the Nile and convert the indigenous people to Christianity, a history that many in modern-day Scotland are uncomfortable with.

Malawians, however, tend to beam with pride and reverence when his name is mentioned. In modern-day Malawi,

David Livingstone, of Blantyre, Scotland, is very much a national hero in Blantyre, Malawi.

The links between the countries solidified into support from Scotland’s councils and government in 2004, when the lord provosts of Glasgow and Edinburgh launched the Scotland Malawi partnership, an initiative supported by the Scottish Government.

Since then the partnership has grown at an astonishing rate, as Scots have taken Malawi to their hearts. Schools, homes, churches, offices and hospitals have offered practical support, mutual benefits and friendship. Fundraising, knowledge and experience from Scotland has made a dramatic impact.

Malawi, a country of 17.67 million people, is slowly emerging from grinding poverty with Scotland’s help.

The size of families is falling as parents begin to develop some confidence that their children will survive into adulthood. As recently as 1980, Malawian women had an average of 7.64 births. This had fallen to 4.41 births per woman by 2016.

In 1980, the average life expectancy in the country was 46.1 years, but by 2016 it had grown to 62.6 years. The decrease in the size of families and the increase in life expectancy is in part down to Scotland’s support.

Education in Malawi and much of

Africa remains a luxury for the rich. Primary school education was made free to all in 1994 but the huge influx of students that this attracted meant that schools were overwhelmed, with class sizes of between 50 and 70 pupils taught by a teacher often trying to teach two or more classes at the same time. As a result, only 35% of children finish primary school. Only 14.9% of females and 24.2% of males complete secondary education.

Scottish charities have given huge amounts of time and energy to improve these figures. Charities of all sizes and individuals have twinned with and supported health and education organisations from Blantyre in the south to Mzuzu in the north.

The charity that first took me to Africa was a healthcare charity, the Emergency Medicine Malawi project, a team of accident and emergency staff from Ninewells, Dundee, and throughout Scotland. Led by Barry Klaassen and Gwen Gordon, they brought adult accident and emergency medicine to the country for the first time after hearing horror stories of countless needless deaths from Scottish medical staff already working there.

Barry and Gwen worked with both governments to source funding for their project. The Wellcome Trust provided the building and infrastructure which allowed these project leaders to travel to Malawi and spend several months away from their families as they planned, taught and wrote up protocols.

Once the project was set up and the department opened, other Scottish nurses and doctors came out for two-week blocks, often taking their own holidays to do so, to mentor and coach their

Malawian counterparts.

Both governments have shown their support for the astonishing success of this project in saving life and limb by asking the project to continue and develop a trauma care network throughout the country by opening a further three emergency departments to cover the country’s four main cities.

While taking part in this project, I was moved to tears by stories from the locals I met of their desire for an education that would give them the chance to escape terrible poverty.

After dinner I would walk down to the compound’s gatehouse to talk poetry with the bare-footed gate keeper Paul, ‘‘the people’s poet’’.

I introduced him to Burns and

WB Yeats. He introduced me to his works, written on second-hand, scrunched-up discarded paper.

His parting words haunt me yet: “All I need is a chance Mr Charlie, and then I know I will be a success”.

My colleagues and I returned to our evening drinks as the setting sun bled across the sky. His words, and the poverty and injustice around me, made me remember my truancy and general lack of effort at school, filling me with shame and regret.

When I came home and discussed my experiences with my wife and friends, they encouraged me to follow my heart and set up our education charity Maura’s Mission (MM).

This charity works with national schools in the economic desert of the north of the country, where only those who have scored in the top 2% on the primary school leavers’ exams are invited to attend. Unfortunately many families will be unable to pay the school fees and so many girls and boys are sent home.

This is where MM steps in. After the school has had a chance to assess that the child genuinely has the academic potential and that they are from a family who clearly cannot pay the fees, the schools then recommend pupils to MM, who bring them back into education to keep their dreams alive.

Following the schools’ request, the boys are funded at 50% with the families having to find the other 50%, while the girls receive 100% payment of fees, as education of females is often not thought to be a priority in the rural villages. Indeed we sponsor girls whose brothers scored the points to gain entry to a national secondary school but whose family were only able to afford the school fees of one child.

On completion of secondary school, those who have shown the greatest potential can apply to MM, which tries to find sponsors for university education.

There are currently young students who our charity found in early secondary school, and who will commence their final years as medical students after this worldwide lockdown has eased.

These students’ lives have been changed beyond measure, plucked from below the poverty line in rural villages and placed in the top schools and universities that Malawi has.

For the past eight years Maura’s Mission has been a small, “hobby” charity, funding 25 boys at 50% and 13 girls at 100%. We have made mistakes, we have learned, and we have grown. Our strap ine “Nurture me and I will grow” is as true of our charity as it is of our students.

But without this new alliance between our countries, without the compassion and sense of injustice that powers so many extraordinary links between Scotland and Malawi, the donors that support us would achieve little and these young men and women would be subsistence farmers and teenage brides instead of doctors, teachers and civil engineers with the most potential to change Malawi’s future.