Impact of monetary incentives on teacher retention in and attraction to rural primary schools: Case of the rural allowance in Salima District of Malawi

Abstract

The study attempted to examine the extent to which a rural allowance makes primary school teachers remain in rural schools and attract them from urban to the rural schools of Salima District. A Likert Scale questionnaire was used to collect data from 333 participants, comprising 250 teachers from rural schools and 83 teachers from urban schools. The researcher used Statistical Package for the Social Sciences to analyse the data. The study found that the current amount of rural allowance was inadequate incentive to attract teachers already serving in rural schools to remain there and also attract teachers presently in urban schools to go to rural schools. To attract teachers from urban to rural schools and to make those in rural schools to remain there, the study recommended that different degrees of ruralness should be incentivized according to the level of hardship. Further, the education authorities should introduce additional incentives to alleviate the hardship that teachers experience in rural schools. Moreover, schools should be allowed to recruit teachers that are interested to work in rural schools.

Keywords: Attraction, incentives, retention, rural allowance, teachers.

This article is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0