Secretary to the President and Cabinet Colleen Zamba has said Malawi has no excuses for slow implementation of the first 10- year Malawi-2063 Implementation Plan (MIP-1).
Zamba was speaking in Lilongwe on Monday when she opened the Pillar and Enabler Coordination Groups (PECGs) meetings.
According to Zamba, while the economy has been affected by pandemics, disasters, and geopolitics, they should not be used as excuses for Malawians just to sit and watch.
“We should be innovative in our approach, and even find opportunities within the shocks, for turning things around. Our economy is now struggling with limited fiscal space, foreign exchange shortages and high debt levels but we do have low hanging fruits which can turn around our economy.
“MIP-1 highlights quick win interventions, game changer interventions and flagship projects. If we can effectively implement them, we can achieve our 2030 milestones, but that needs our commitment and coordinated efforts,” Zamba said.
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Last year, National Planning Commission (NPC) released the first MIP-1 Annual Progress Report, which revealed a rather slow start to the MIP-1 with 20 percent of the interventions on track, 21 percent of interventions not started and in between interventions were at various levels of off track, slow progress, among others.
Recently, the Government of Malawi, through NPC and the Department of Economic Planning and Development in the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs, facilitated the establishment of PECGs to ensure a coordinated and systematic approach to the implementation of Malawi 2063.
Zamba noted that while the government takes the leadership role in the management and operations of the PECGs, development partners should continue to align and harmonise their support to pillar and enabler priorities and participate fully at the meetings.
She said stakeholders such as private sector, CSOs, academia and others should form part of the pillar and enabler coordination groups and be assigned specific tasks to ensure coordinated policy dialogue, planning, resource mobilisation, implementation, reporting, and monitoring and evaluation.
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NPC Commissioner Mercy Masoo said the government needs to take an active role in catalysing investments in the strategic sectors of the economy where forex can either be generated or indeed preserved through import substitution.
“Therefore, establishing and capitalising the trailbrazer institutions like the National Mining Company and the newly revamped Malawi Development Corporation as well as capitalising a fully-reformed and commercially-oriented Admarc to be a massive aggregator of farm produce, an agro-processor and exporter, will be critical. These would be important efforts in de-risking investments in areas where the private sector may not yet feel comfortable to go it alone.
“These trail-brazing institutions would establish Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) in strong alliance with the private sector. Once the SPVs are generating profits, government would have to pull out and sell its shares to Malawians thereby creating a cadre of wealthy middle-income citizens – a true spirit of the Malawi 2063,” Masoo said.
According to Masoo, Malawi needs to generate wealth if the country is to achieve the MW2063 aspirations.
“While we appreciate the support of our development partners, we cannot continue to rely on the good will of others – it is not sustainable.
“In this case, the private sector is our strongest ally but government should actively intervene where market failures exist. This country is slowly developing but it requires our coordinated efforts to accelerate the speed,” Masoo said.
President Lazarus Chakwera officially launched the Malawi 2063 on January 19 2021 as a national development blueprint to take the country to an upper middle-income country by 2063.
Later, on November 8 2021, he officially launched the MIP-1, which is operationalising the Malawi 2063 up to 2030.
The MIP-1 has two key milestones to be attained by 2030 namely graduating Malawi country to a lower middle-income economy; and meeting most of Sustainable Development Goals, this being the last decade of action.
