Government has started establishing job centres in all four cities towards 1 million job creation pledge made during campaign

Maravi Express

On the progress made towards job creation — which was the Tonse Alliance campaign for the Presidency, Lazarus Chakwera told Parliament today, February 3 in his State of the Nation (SONA) address that Government has started establishing job centres in all the four cities of Malawi.

Chakwera said Malawi has not been spared from the CoVID-19 that hit global labour markets hard, and in view of this, during the 2021/22 Financial Year, “Government has been developing the National Job Creation Strategy which is our blueprint for job creation in the next 5 years”.

He said the job centres “will give job seekers easy access to employment opportunities, and will be fitted with a job matching portal that will facilitate electronic information exchange and enable job seekers to access vacancies and secure jobs through online platforms.

“The portal will also help us track jobs created and provide real-time data. The portal will be linked with the Labour Market Information System, because as I have been saying, delivering this promise of jobs cannot be done without fixing the systems that affect the same.

“Additionally, during the year under review, Government continued to expand access to TEVET through the establishment of new Community

Technical Colleges as a means of equipping the youth 25 with employable skills.

“Apart from the 16 colleges we made operational the previous year, two more have been completed in Salima and Nkhatabay, while three others are almost done.

“As a supplement to these job creation efforts, last November I launched the Presidential Initiative on Job Creation. At that time, I reported that my Administration has not only been creating jobs, but also protecting jobs that would otherwise have been lost without our intervention.

“And because of those interventions, the World Bank now confirms that Malawi’s labour market has recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Madam Speaker, although we have not reached our target of 1 million jobs in the timeframe we set due to three successive waves of CoVID-19 that we did not foresee when we set that target, we have come impressively close.

“Government now estimates that in the 2021/22 Fiscal Year, the number of jobs created in both private and public sectors stood at 997,423. In furtherance of our job creation agenda, we will be working closely with the private sector and business community.

“Since job creation cannot be delivered by Government alone, my Administration considers the private sector a key ally, not an adversary. As such, we intend to remove the barriers and obstacles that stand in the way of private enterprise.

“I therefore repeat my invitation for the business community to engage us to develop opportunities for our people.

On the progress towards food security, due to favourable weather conditions and the Affordable Inputs Programme, Malawi remains food secure as a total of 4,581,524 metric tonnes of maize was produced in the 2020/2021 agricultural season.

“As of 35 days ago, the national Food Balance Sheet indicates that the country had a total supply of 1,693,997 MT, compared to 861,868 MT of total maize required for this first quarter of 2022.

“Despite the country being food secure at national level, it is worth pointing out that there will be some isolated hotspots of food insufficiency in various districts, including Chikwawa, Nsanje, Mangochi, Zomba, Lilongwe, Nkhotakota, Karonga, and Nkhata Bay.”

The Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee (MVAC) 2021 Annual Assessment projected over 1.6 million people to be food insecure during the 2021/2022 consumption year. However, Chakwera said Government has already released about 17,000 MT of maize as humanitarian food to be distributed to the affected households, while keeping ADMARC markets open for those who need to access more.

“Notwithstanding our state of national food sufficiency, the second installment of the Affordable Inputs Programme has suffered systemic disruptions and delays that justify our resolve to combine our efforts to deliver the Administration’s key priorities with equally important efforts to fix the systems that affect the speed and quality of the public services we are delivering.

“That is why our interventions in the agricultural sector have gone beyond the roll out of programmes like AIP, and sought to also fix food systems that have either been neglected or sluggish for years.

“Towards that end, in the 2021/22 Financial Year, Government continued to implement the Shire Valley Transformation Project (SVTP), the Agriculture in Youth and Agribusiness Project (AIYAP), Program for Rural Irrigation Development under PRIDE Project, the Agriculture Commercialisation (AGCOM) Project, and the Affordable Inputs Programme (AIP). Government will continue implementing these projects in the 2022/23 Financial Year.

“Additionally, Government will commence construction and rehabilitation of 6 small-holder solar-powered and gravity-fed irrigation schemes at Nkawinda in Blantyre, Mazame in Dedza, Kamwaza in Machinga, Chomboto in Chikwawa, Tikondane and Milonga in Thyolo district, covering a total of 690 hectares under Malawi Resilience and Disaster Recovery Management Project (MRDRMP) at a cost of US$9.3 million.”