Macoha decries lack of support
Malawi Council for the Handicapped ( Macoha) is failing to recover from effects of the fire that gutted its Bangwe offices in Blantyre back in 1998.
The fire affected sewing and embroidery machines at their weaving factory among other things.
Centre manager at the weaving factory, Henderson Nyondo told Nation Online that his centre currently makes about K1.2 million a month from the K10 million they used to make before the fire.
“The fire which bunt our offices affected us greatly and you can see that we do not have a sewing and embroidery machine, printer (vinyl) and looms for weaving.”
Efforts to get operations back to normal at the factory has been hitting a wall as funds have not been available to repair machinery affected by the fire and recently the organisation submitted proposals to some organisations, hoping for a miracle.
“We wrote a proposal [last year] and submitted to Malawi Investment and Trade Centre (MITC) which we also forwarded to Malawi Enterprise Productivity Enhancement (Mepe) asking for help for the machines,” said Nyondo on Saturday in an interview.
Nyondo said his centre has been facing a lot of challenges as it has been unable to generate enough money.
“As you know this is a training centre for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) but the centre has been failing to develop their capacity . The rehabilitation programe has been affected,” added Nyondo.
In November last year, Macoha together with SMEs participated in the Global Expo Botswana at Botswana Conference & Exhibition Center in Gaborone, Botswana to showcase Malawian products with the technical support from the Malawi Investment and Trade Centre (MITC).
During the exhibition, Macoha got some offers to supply their products to Botswana but with their current status,they can not manage to do so.
“Now we cannot manage to send our products to Botswana until a miracle happens,” said Nyondo.
But project manager for Mepe, Nelson Nsiku, when asked in an interview about the proposal Macoha had sent to them had words of hope for Macoha.
“Things will be alright soon. We are doing something over it and I can assure you that within the week, we will announce good news,” said Nsiku.
