LILONGWE-(MaraviPost)-President Lazarus Chakwera, on Wednesday held discussions with Zarau Wendeline Kibwe, the newly appointed Executive Director of the World Bank’s Africa Group at KamuzuPalace in the capitalLilongwe.
The meeting aimed at strengthening Malawi government’s partnership with the Bank in completing various strategic development projects that have been implementing across the country.
The projects are expected to have the long-term effect of increasing economic activity, job opportunities and income for Malawians.
The projects including President’s initiative to increase access to electricity, which has already moved from 9% of the population when Chakwera took office to 25% of the population presently, with the aim of partnering with the World Bank to further increase this to 70% of the population by 2030.
It also includes the President’s Mega Farms initiative from which a sizable proportion of the emergency maize that is being distributed to vulnerable and food-insecure families whose crops were destroyed by drought last year, which the President intends to scale up going forward, with heavy investments in Irrigation technologies in partnership with the World Bank.
It further includes Chakwera’s ATM Strategy to invest the World Bank’s IDA21 resources in boosting productivity in Agriculture, Tourism, and Mining for export, as a long-term and permant cure for the forex challenges that Malawi has had since 1994.
This also included investments in the Government’s plans to monetize such rich mineral resources as the enormous rutile and titanium deposit that the Chakwera Administration discovered at the President’s home village of Kasiya and turn them into so reign wealth fund for the developmental and socioeconomic transformation of Malawi for generation to come.
During the meeting, Kibwe expressed great enthusiasm for the opportunity the World Bank has to partner with the Chakwera Government that has proven able to implement financial management reforms, through a robust and rigorous accountability and transparency framework, that has met the exacting and high standards of such bodies as the International Monetary Fund and the Open Government Partnership.
Chakwera was accompanied in the meeting by his Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs Simplex Chithyola, newly appointed Governor of the Reserve Bank, Dr. McDonald Mafuta Mwale, and other officials from the Treasury.
The meeting was held as part of the President’s preparations for his upcoming participation in the Energy Summit for Heads of State to be hosted from January 27 to 29 by the World Bank in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, where the President will preside over the signing of new energy compacts to power Malawi’s development projects.
