Malawi and Botswana extolled for their national development plans

NPC’s Director General Dr. Munthali interacting with acting UN Resident Coordinator in Malawi, Rudolf Schwenk

By Tione Andsen, MANA

Malawi and Botswana have been singled out as the only countries that have their development agenda which is aligned to Africa Union (AU) Agenda 2063.

Director General of National Planning Commission (NPC), Dr. Thomas Munthali disclosed this Tuesday at Sunbird Lilongwe Hotel in Lilongwe during the official opening of a four-day Applied Training on Integrated Planning and Reporting (IPRT), saying the national plans for the two countries have set out clearly that they want to be self-reliant by 2063 which was in line with AU 2063 Agenda.

Munthali said the AU 2063 Agenda, a continental development blue print, encourages member states to aspire for better things for their people.

“We believe Malawi and Botswana will be use as model countries to spearhead the attainment if the AU agenda 2063. Africa should strive to be formidable global player in facilitating its development agenda,” he said.

The Director General added that the component of urbanization in MW2063 has attracted a lot of interest from various development partners and are willing to see how it would be implemented in the country.  

He said this was a second level training aims are empowering local councils to align their plans to the Agenda 2063 in their implementation, saying there was need to train more planners so they should have the capacity to truck and report council plans in collaboration with MW2063.

The Integrated Planning and Reporting Tool was organized by Development Planning Section, Macroeconomics and Governance Division of the Sub-regional office for southern Africa, Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) in collaboration with NPC.

Present at the opening ceremony was acting United Nations Resident Coordinator in Malawi, Rudolf Schwenk, who pointed out that the IPRT was a web-based multi-level platform developed by Economic Commission for Africa  to assist member states to integrate regional and global agendas into national development plans.

“The tool assists countries to synchronize, measure and track progress in attaining both Agenda 2030 and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and Agenda 2063 for the African Union.”

He also said through this tool, member states could simultaneously track progress towards the seven aspirations of Agenda 2063, and 17 goals and 169 targets of Agenda 2030.

Acting Director for Macroeconomics and Governance Division at Economic Commission for Africa, Bartholomew Armah said CoVID-19 had negative effects to the development agenda of most Africa countries, struggled to acquire its vaccines due to limited financial resources unlike the developed countries that were able to purchase in large quantities.

Armah believes that Africa countries should give priority to the health sector by providing adequate financial resources for it to operate without hurdles.