Expert tips govt on financing policies

The government has been challenged to develop policies that would help ease Malawi’s overdependence on agriculture.

George Sibale, who is the Managing Director of FG Consulting, made the remarks yesterday in an interview on the sidelines of the Policy Formulation and Analysis Conference which National Planning Commission (NPC) organised in Mangochi District.

Sibale said Malawi has some good policies, which if implemented, can help uplift the lives of ordinary people.

“However, we need to find alternative sources of income to finance implementation of those policies. We have noted through the Vision 2020 that some polices failed to be implemented due to political and financial constraints,” he said.

But most importantly, Sibale said there was need for stakeholders to come up with feasible ideas that would help make the agriculture sector more productive.

“We have the tobacco  industry which is struggling, so it has come important that the government should come up with policies that should diversify the economy away from tobacco and look to other sectors that can bring in money. Such sectors include tourism, energy and mining industry,” he said.

In his remarks, Development and Planning Manager for NPC, Idrissa Mwale, said the conference was among the initiatives which the commission has put in place to ensure that performance of all government institutions is reviewed and analysed before coming up with policies aligned to Agenda 2063, which is an extension of Vision 2020.

He said NPC has engaged the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning and other sectors to ensure that all the established policies are getting resource support for implementation.

“In the past, it was difficult for Malawi to analyse the performance of

some policies. But our mandate as the NPC is to ensure that the government Ministries , Departments and Agencies are coming up with policies that are achievable and relevant to the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy,” he said.

Mwale said NPC has, this year, reviewed available government policies and noted that there are some policies that have performed well although the majority of them are gathering dust.