By Kingsley Jassi:
Malawi’s attractiveness to investors shows strong recovery in 2025 as statistics show investor interest worth $466 million.
The statistics, sourced from the Malawi Investment and Trade Centre (MITC), represent a 112 percent increase from $220 million registered in the previous year.
However, the downside to this could be the record of low actualisation of such investment interest, with some studies estimating it at 25 percent rate, largely due to structural, policy and administrative bottlenecks.
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Two of the investment pledges take up $371 million and they include a proposed $189 million cement manufacturing plant by Chinese company Gowan Zhong Ventures and a $182 million fertiliser manufacturing project from Burundi, Itracom Fomi.
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If implemented, the two ventures would boost the critical sectors of the economy—agriculture and construction—as other projects include a $50 million sugar manufacturing by MB Holdings by United States and Indian investors, $10 million for commercial farming by Lotus Holdings of The Netherlands, among others.
This comes days after Finance, Economic Planning and Decentralisation Minister Joseph Mwanamvekha said the government was working with a foreign investor to set up a fertiliser production plant as one way of reducing the cost of the key input.
“The country will start manufacturing fertiliser locally and there is an investor already,” Mwanamvekha said.
However, MITC Public Relations officer Ndondwa Msaka could not be drawn to make any comments on the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) data she provided.
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The recent trade reports by Export Development Fund (EDF) for 2024 highlights the ongoing challenges to attract FDI as compared to peers and neighbours.
The report shows that, in 2019, the country registered as the lowest FDI at just $55 million.
According to EDF, the low performance suggests that Malawi’s fundamentals remain less attractive to investors compared to its peers, even within the vulnerable economy group.
“The lack of consistent FDI inflows into Malawi partly reflects the limited pipeline of bankable, investment-ready projects in sectors with strong export potential,” the report reads.
While the country attracted just $220 million FDI interests in 2024, neighbouring countries— Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania—registered $3.5 billion, $1.2 billion and $1.7 billion, in that order.
