How to place coordinates points on a vector layer?

Question

I have got GPS coordinates collected from a number of farms in my country (Malawi). But when I plot these GPS coordinates on a vector layer (my country map) using QGIS, the points are falling outside the country. Actually the points fall in Indian Ocean.

The coordinates were collected in decimal degrees. I tried to change them from decimal degrees to UTM still it did not work. The CRS in a GPS gadget was WGS84 same was used in QGIS. Pleases help?

These are some of the coordinates:

1. S 15.04074, E 34.71926, 1037 m
2. S 15.05633, E 34.71407, 1053 m
3. S 15.03052, E 34.70221, 1165 m
4. S 15.03939, E 34.69643, 1334 m

Answer 1

I did some reformating to your data:

N, E, height
-15.04074, 34.71926, 1037
-15.05633, 34.71407, 1053
-15.03052, 34.70221, 1165
-15.03939, 34.69643, 1334

and it loads perfectly as delimited text inside Malawi:

Note that QGIS always wants coordinates in East - North order, unless you specfiy it in the header. Southern and western coordinates require a negative sign.

Answer 2

as Mkennedy says, show us an example of the points.

it sounds like you may have a different CRS that what is acceptable in GIS. I have had similar problems whereby i was given a mix of long lat coords and others. Some were expressed as degrees minutes seconds, some as degrees and decimal minutes.

My solution was to covert the points using a formula within Excel and saving as a CSV file.