Malawi and the rest of Africa will be acquainted with procedures and requirements to access funds from the $60 billion Chinese funding package agreed during the last Forum on China Africa Cooperation (Focas) summit in South Africa.<\/p>\n
Chinese Government will hold a follow up conference in Beijing from July 29 involving ministerial delegates from all African countries where, among others, it will clarify on how countries could draw from the pool to finance qualifying projects.<\/p>\n
Briefing the media on Friday at the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Beijing, Chinese Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister, Zhang Ming, hinted that some countries are facing challenges to understand the requirements, saying 30 of them have setup coordinating teams for their projects.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow to use the funding needs further clarification,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe purpose of the coordinators meeting will be to address the mentioned challenges.\u201d It could not be immediately established as to who will represent Malawi at the conference which will involve exposure to Chinese investors, industrial development models, finance access information, among others.<\/p>\n
In a recent interview, Malawi\u2019s Ministry of Finance spokesperson, Nations Msowoya, said government was working with the technical teams from Exim Bank (of China) to agree on the final details of the projects under this funding.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce the details are known we will need to ensure that the\u00a0 due process of taking them to parliament and obtaining the necessary approvals like environmental screening is done quickly to avoid losing time in terms of implementation,\u201d he said, adding that the projects are in infrastructure such as roads, energy and in health sector.<\/p>\n
However, he said, it was noticed that the private sector was not forth coming yet in Malawi to access the loans available in the package, apparently due to lack of information.<\/p>\n
The $60 billion package for the next three years includes concessional loans to governments for public projects that aim at improving business environment, zero interest loans to support developmental projects in agriculture, health and poverty and some facility that SMEs in African countries such as Malawi could access loans to implement their detailed business plans.<\/p>\n
However, Zhang emphasized that the Chinese financial institutions tasked to disburse the funds will have to thoroughly examine project proposals to ensure they make economic sense before funds are released.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Malawi and the rest of Africa will be acquainted with procedures and requirements to access funds from the $60 billion Chinese funding package agreed during the last Forum on China Africa Cooperation (Focas) summit in South Africa. Chinese Government will hold a follow up conference in Beijing from July 29 involving ministerial delegates from all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":28702,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28701","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\/28701","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=28701"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28703,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28701\/revisions\/28703"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}