Since 1980 harsh economic factors have hit Malawi: periodic drought and subsequent decline in crop output, falling world prices for export commodities, and an ever heavier debt burden. How have these economic shocks touched children and schools? This article shows how Malawi's protracted period of adjustment temporarily towered school enrolment, as rural families drew on their children's labour to backstop erosion of subsistence and surplus production. But this slowing of school expansion was short lived. Popular demand for primary education rebounded strongly, far outpacing the government's limited fiscal capacity to build more schools and train more teachers. African states, facing hostile economic conditions, can try to accommodate rising school enrolments — thereby extending ‘opportunity’ and legitimating the government's own authority. The resulting decline in school quality, however, is severe as static levels of resources are spread over a burgeoning number of children. Under such tight resource constraints, inequities between levels of schooling remain politically difficult to address.