Background

The University of Malawi - the mother university in Malawi - was founded in 1964. Teaching started on 29th September 1965 at the newly established campus which used to be an Asian Secondary School in Blantyre. Only 90 students were enrolled. By 1967, the then Institute of Public Administration at Mpemba, the Soche Hill College of Education, the Polytechnic, all these in Blantyre, and Bunda College of Agriculture in Lilongwe were incorporated as constituent colleges of the University of Malawi. Except for Bunda College and the Polytechnic, the other colleges moved to Zomba in 1973 to form the University of Malawi campus. Kamuzu College of Nursing became the fourth constituent college in September 1979. In 1991 the College of Medicine was established in Blantyre as the fifth constituent college of the University of Malawi.

One cannot conceive of higher education in Malawi without talking about the mother of all universities – the University of Malawi. Since its establishment, the University of Malawi has been instrumental in training and developing a reliable human resource that has gone to service various sectors of society in the country and the region. The recent boom of universities in the country has partly been possible because personnel to run such universities is readily available, a huge percentage of which is the University of Malawi trained. Graduates from the University of Malawi have gone to excel in other universities in the region and beyond as graduate students as well as faculty. This attests to the quality of graduates that the university churns.