CSO report ruesworsening poverty
Poorly implemented and misaligned economic policies have undermined government’s efforts to reduce poverty and inequalities in the country, a report from the Centre for Social Concern (CfSC) shows.
In its annual report for the year 2022 released on Thursday in Lilongwe, the centre observed that persistent poverty in Malawi is largely determined by “how society shares its resources, instead of the availability of the resources”.
In an interview on the sidelines of the launch, CfSC executive director Father James Ngahy expressed concern with the worsening poverty levels and urged government to be prudent in managing public resources.
He said: “The government is trying to do too much at once. There are construction projects in Mzuzu and Lilongwe.
“It would have been better to complete one project [and have it produce results] than have several projects that are in progress and not yielding any discernible returns [in real time].”
On his part, Copenhagen Consensus Centre (CCC) founder and president Bjorn Lomborg said Malawi will miss its targets on the sustainable development goals by 70 years because the country does not have ample fiscal space to invest in all the priority areas or pillars to catalyse growth.
In a separate interview, CfSC data collector Damiano Taombe said the finding from the centre’s prior research confirmed that people are struggling to make ends meet as the economy is still reeling from exogenous shocks such as Cyclone Freddy and the cholera epidemic that rocked the country earlier this year.
He said: “It is sad that there are still some employers who are paying less than K100 000 when the cost of living for an average family in an urban area is well above that.”
In February, the centre actively lobbied the government to raise the tax-free bracket from K100 000 to K200 000 in the 2023/24 financial year amid concerns that the rising cost of living has severely eroded the value of people’s incomes.
The government, through the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs, did not revise the tax-bracket to the level required by CfSC, but instead reconfigured the pay-as-you-earn tax bracket to cushion low-income earners.
