The road from Kapiri to Zomba is more than 300 kilometres. For one young man, it took twelve years, three scholarships and a refusal to give up.
When he was eight years old, his teachers in Kapiri already knew he was different. He finished his exercises before the chalk dust settled, then helped the children beside him finish theirs. But talent alone doesn’t pay school fees, and by the end of primary school, his family faced the decision so many face: which child stays in school?
That was the year the John and Prisca Foundation’s scholarship program found him.
A scholarship is more than fees
The scholarship covered his fees, uniform and books — but just as importantly, it came with people. A mentor who checked his progress every term. A foundation officer who visited his school. A quiet, steady message repeated year after year: we expect you at university.
“They didn’t just pay my fees. They made me believe the fees were worth paying.”
— Scholarship recipient, UNIMA
He rewarded that belief. Top of his class through secondary school, he earned one of the highest marks in his district on the national examinations — and a place at the University of Malawi, the country’s most prestigious university.
Paying it forward
Today he is one of the brightest students in his faculty, and one of more than 70 young people the foundation has supported from early childhood to university. During vacations he returns to Kapiri, where he tutors the current cohort of scholarship students — children sitting in the same classrooms he once did.
“Chance put me in a poor village,” he says. “But I never accepted that chance should rule my life.”