Finance Minister, Goodall Gondwe, has said most of the conditions that donors set in order to resume budgetary aid are almost fulfilled, stressing that the Access to Information Bill will be presented next month when Parliament meets.<\/p>\n
Gondwe said following the discussions with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), he is confident that government is on track to fulfill conditions that would attract budget support from World Bank and European Union of a total of about K50 billion.<\/p>\n
Gondwe was speaking on Tuesday in an interview with some media houses at the Ministry headquarters in Lilongwe in his update on the economy, where he projected an economic stability by May.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are about to complete some of the conditions, apart from the famous Access to Information Bill which they want us to pass [in Parliament] which we will do in February\u2014that\u2019s quite clear to me, it will be done,\u201d said Gondwe.<\/p>\n
He, however, said apart from the institutional donors he is not expecting such comebacks from bilateral donors, even after any fulfillment of any conditions, saying the donors have not only deserted Malawi with budget support but other countries as well.<\/p>\n
He said the Extended Credit Facility (ECF) of the IMF is now on track having been told so at the IMF headquarters during his recent trip to<\/p>\n
Washington.<\/p>\n
Among the tough conditions that he said have almost been met include reducing domestic borrowing and a review of the Money Laundering Act.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the past three months we have almost stopped domestic borrowing,\u201d said Gondwe, urging Malawians to have confidence that things will improve.<\/p>\n
However, Gondwe said he is keeping his fingers crossed that the country will have a good growing season as any weather hiccups will expose the already frail economy dangerously.<\/p>\n
The economy is projected to grow by slightly over three percent this year but Gondwe said should there be a good harvest, he sees the economy bouncing back with growth of over five percent at the end of this fiscal year.<\/p>\n
Gondwe said more focus will be on boosting irrigation farming through the Green Belt Initiative (GBI), saying Indian and Chinese aid will help with investments in the GBI which has been slowed by funding issues.<\/p>\n
Earlier on, government disclosed that it will task the GBI to produce at least one million tonnes of maize and legumes through irrigation as it anticipates poor rain season and Gondwe said through the GBI the country will start depending less on rains.<\/p>\n
Gondwe said there will be more reviews of Farm Input Subsidy Programme (Fisp) to further reduce costs while graduating some beneficiaries while some user fees in some public services will be either increased or introduced.<\/p>\n
He said there are a lot of reforms underground, urging Malawians to realise the country is now on its own in terms financing government operations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Finance Minister, Goodall Gondwe, has said most of the conditions that donors set in order to resume budgetary aid are almost fulfilled, stressing that the Access to Information Bill will be presented next month when Parliament meets. Gondwe said following the discussions with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), he is confident that government is on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":15860,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15858"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15862,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15858\/revisions\/15862"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}