J.B. Jonazi
Bunda College of Agriculture, P.O. Box 219, Lilongwe, Malawi
E-mail: jbjonazi@sdnp.org.mw
Bunda College of Agriculture is a constituent college of the University of Malawi. It has about 70 lecturers and over five hundred students at undergraduate and graduate level in one of seven departments ranging from crop science to animal science to agricultural engineering. The college has two MSc qualified biometrics lecturers who are available for consultancy to all lecturers and students.
Statistical courses given to students include a) introduction to statistics, b) design and analysis of experiments and c) biometry and computing.
Computing facilities are extremely weak with only a few lecturers having a computer in their office. The general computer pool available to students comprises a total of 15 286 computers only. One or two departments have small computer rooms for exclusive use, but the Department of Crop Science, that houses the two biometricians, has none. Mstat is the only statistical package available to undergraduate students. Some lecturers and their graduate students have access to unlicensed copies of Genstat, SAS or SPSS.
With these extremely limited computing facilities it is impossible to give practical demonstrations of data collection in the field, nor their analysis and interpretation. Thus, statistical courses are predominately theoretical.
