Vision 2020 successor consultations launch on
National Planning Commission (NPC) says it is set for the launch of nationwide consultation for developing the successor to Vision 2020 in Lilongwe this Friday.
The event, to be presided over by President Peter Mutharika, Speaker of Parliament Catherine Gotani Hara and Chief Justice Andrew Nyirenda, will be held under the theme Beyond Inclusive Envisioning to Getting Things Done.
NPC director general Thomas Munthali on Wednesday announced the change of venue to Bingu International Convention Centre (BICC) in Lilongwe from Comesa Hall in Blantyre as earlier announced, to allow members of Parliament (MPs) to attend the event given that Parliament will rise on Friday by noon.
He said tomorrow’s launch will lead to an extensive nationwide consultative process to ensure the document reflects aspirations of all Malawians.
Vision 2020, which was Malawi’s first long-term national development plan and was launched in 1998, expires this year.
In the wake of the blueprint’s expiry, NPC, in collaboration with other stakeholders, has since last year led the process of formulating a successor document to be called National Transformational 2063.
The consultations, according to Munthali, will take the form of meetings, group discussions, surveys, one-on-one meetings, radio phone-in programmes, television hosted shows and written submissions, among others.
He said: “Those to be consulted will principally be Malawian citizens as well as other groups such as public sector, private sector, non-governmental organisations, faith-based organisations, political parties, youth a, local governments, diaspora and academia, among others,”
In the nation-wide consultations, NPC will seek to understand answers to questions such as: What kind of Malawi do we want to see by 2063? What should a common Malawian look like by 2063? What needs to be done differently and by who?
Findings from a review exercise of Vision 2020 validated on November 19 last year in Lilongwe revealed that despite Malawi making progress in some indicators during the implementation period, the country failed to meet most of the targets with the performance rated under-par and below the world’s average in some instances.
Oliver Saasa, proprietor and lead consultant of Premier Consult Limited, a firm which reviewed and analysed the performance of Vision 2020, said Vision 2020 poor performance suggests that Malawi requires a more realistic development path in terms of both the underlying assumptions and resource availability.
“The nine pillars of Vision 2020 expressed Malawi’s needs and reflected the people’s aspirations. However, the many areas of interventions catalogued did not sufficiently reflect the national capacity realities on the ground,” he said.
According to Saasa, there is evidence that better results would have been realised if the crafters of Vision 2020 had targeted fewer and more strategic priorities in a way that aligned interventions to the available resources and competences.
