Rural Development Investment Initiative Trust (Rudevit) has said it requires an extra K1.1 billion to complete its fertiliser manufacturing plant at Chileka in Blantyre.
This, the firm says, has been necessitated by delays in financing facilities, recent economic development including weakening of the Kwacha and rising inflation.
In an interview on Tuesday, Rudevit Chairman Hastings Bofomo Nyirenda said from 2020, when the idea was hatched, the capital investment required has moved from K390 million to about K2 billion.
He said the cost of putting up electricity lines to connect the facility to the national grid, two kilometres away has moved up.
He said part of the machinery was already secured with a Financial Inclusion and Entrepreneurship Scaling (FinES) loan through NBM Development Bank.
“The bank initially gave us around K262 million to finance the procurement but you remember that the Kwacha has not been stable over the past years, with all these devaluations,” Nyirenda said.
Nyirenda added that Rudevit is still engaging financiers such as the Export Development Fund and FinES to meet the deficit and realise the dream.
The fertiliser plant project engineer Widson Honde said construction works are on-going and currently the project is at 50 percent completion.
He said at the end of July, the firm expects to have completed installing all the machinery and that by December production should commence.
“Production from this site, following the last revision that we’ve actually looked at, is somewhere around December, assuming all other things are equal. That is to say, all the funds are being made available as we require them,” Honde said.
Rudevit is a group of Malawians with diverse business management background and experience to grasp opportunities in various sectors in rural areas through investment.
Its main aim is to mobilise capital and use available land and labour resources to contribute to economic development through such investments.
The Chileka organic fertiliser plant is its first project.
