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Malawi has one of the highest rates of urbanisation at 5.22 percent per annum. Ironically, it is also one of the least urbanised countries, with just below 20 per cent of the population living in urban areas. With such a paradox, government policy has insisted on rural based development programmes. Much as such policy direction aims at stemming urbanisation, empirical evidence shows that the process is irreversible.  

 The Minister of Finance introduced the 2011/2012 budget which has been termed as a Zero Deficit Budget in which the  government aims to finance all the recurrent expenditures using its own domestic resources.

Industrialisation has been widely understood as a process in which countries undergo a transformation process out of primary agriculture and extractive industries into manufacturing and services industries with higher value-added over time. This is expected to improve the livelihood of people as it translates into higher incomes than in the primary agriculture. Increase in services industry may also translate in efficiency in production as well as distribution of goods which impacts on output and further impacting on livelihood of the population.

Introduction

The Malawi Growth and Development Strategy (MGDS) is the current overarching strategy whose implementation period is 2006-2011. The development of the current MGDS represented a policy shift from that of a social consumption to that of a sustainable growth and infrastructure development with a view to meet the goals of transforming Malawi from a relative poverty into a technological driven middle income industrial nation. The MGDS is based on five thematic areas and a list of priority areas.

The highly publicised adoption of Malawian children David Banda and Mercy James by American pop star Madonna has turned the issue of adoption in Malawi into an important item for public debate. The resultant debate has helped to put the issue into the limelight as a process that needs to be governed by clear and watertight legal and policy frameworks to ensure that adoption serves the best interests of the children who are the subjects of the process.

Government recently announced plans to broaden the tax base as one of its development policy agenda. As a developing nation, Malawi’s fiscal budget is financed by tax revenue supplemented by, among others, donor funds and domestic and external loans. In the 2010/2011 Budget government scaled down the expected funding from donors and increased funding from the local resource base.

Recently, there has been a budding proposition for the increased involvement of the private sector in water services to facilitate effectiveness and efficiency in the provision of these services. Use of Public Private Partnerships have been the most proposed approach of dealing with inefficiencies in most public owned entities. However, such kind of arrangements have not been ventured in sectors such as the water sector as some people feel that these sectors have a social inclination.

In a bid to improve mobile services and to reduce tariff rates, which are among the highest in southern Africa, the Malawi government recently launched an international tender for a fourth mobile phone operator. In fact, they have been trying to increase the number of mobile phone operators to four since May 2008. But is this the best way to improve service and reduce tariff rates?

The view that tariff rates are very high in Malawi was also corroborated by the Information and Communication Technology Association of Malawi (ICTAM) interim President Derek Lakudzala. Mr Lakudzala points out that the high tariffs, among other things, are due to expensive infrastructure such as towers which is not shared among operators and, therefore, a lot of unnecessary cost is passed on to the consumer. A number of people in my network on Facebook have also mentioned this problem. Mr Lakudzala further says purely pushing the blame entirely on the operators is not correct either. He says tax policy regimes and regulatory frameworks also play a role. On his part, ZAIN Malawi Managing Director Fayaz King says reduced taxes and wooing more customers to existing network would enable companies to reduce airtime prices.