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Mid-Term Budget Review: Malawi CSO’s fear for social sectors

Health and education activists fear that the underperfomance of the 2014/15 mid-year budget will affect service delivery of social sectors such as education and health by the end of the financial year.

Minister of Finance Goodall Gondwe’s zero-aid budget has taken off to a stuttering start as he has asked for an additional K32 billion from Parliament after over-expenditures and domestic revenue and grants underperformed by K36.6 billion.

Parliament_2014Civil Society Education Coalition (Csec) executive director Benedicto Kondowe said yesterday service delivery support component of the education budget would likely suffer, resulting in poor quality education.

“This is largely to affect infrastructure development, and procurement of teaching and learning materials which are crucial in delivering quality education,” he said.

Csec has observed that in the 2014/15 National Budget, there is a reduction in the provisions for teaching and learning materials, construction of girls’ hotels compared to the previous financial years.

The health sector has also not been spared the negative effects of the zero-aid budget as Malawi Health Equity Network (Mhen) has noted frequent delays in payment of salaries to healthcare workers which the executive director Martha Kwataine said was demotivating workers.

“Budgetary support is important not only for social service delivery but cushioning of the local currency. For an economy like Malawi that is highly agro-based and seasonal in nature in terms of forex generation, it is the forex brought about by donors that cushions the forex,” she said.

Mhen also condemned the over-expenditures  reported at Malawi Defence Force, National Assembly by 63 percent, Malawi Police Service by 156 percent and Malawi Electoral Commission by 99 percent, saying they were not priority expenditures.

“MRA [Malawi Revenue Authority] keeps boasting of over-collection. Where does the money go?

“A proper analysis will show that it’s for domestic debt repayment all emanating from lack of fiscal discipline by government, both current and previous,” Kwataine said.

Commenting on the donors’ insistence to disburse funding outside the government system until loopholes in public finance management are sealed Health Rights and Education Programme (HREP) director Maziko Matemba said the situation has created parallel implementation of government activities.

“The challenge of funding outside government systems undermines the strengthening of government system to deliver better public services, ownership, continuity,” he said.

The development budget, which Gondwe had projected at K72 billion at mid-year mark has also not performed well with only K14.5 billion spent.

This has also resulted in lack of progress of development programmes, prompting Gondwe to transfer some funding from the development account to votes requiring extra funding.

All indications are the 2014/15 budget without support from donors will face such challenges even in the event of over-collections of revenue.

 

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One Comment

  1. Boost your own economy, collect taxes and stop relying on another country to run your services. If they don’t have the money to give you, you just have to wait or do without. Its their foreign government’s tax payers’ money that Malawi is relying on . Stop the begging and create your own

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