The Greenbelt Authority is working against a goal of achieving a 300 Billion Kwacha Investment in the next five to seven years, the Authority recently revealed.
The ambitious goal which is outlined in the Authority's Strategic Plan lies against the commonly understood notion that Malawi's economy relies on agriculture and that the country's economy can be healed through large scale commercial agriculture.
According to the Authority's Chief Executive Officer Eric Dudley Chidzungu, Malawi has the capacity to maximize its economic gains through commercial agriculture, given the proper support from public and private investors in various irrigation ventures that the Authority is championing across the country.
"In our Strategic to be launched shortly, the key areas are about the financing of the projects. We are engaging financiers through formal contacts and various approaches including the media, requesting investors in various categories to join hands with us. We are not segregating the levels at which any investor wants to partner with us; be it land owners, actual financiers and those who want to team up with us in production for high value crops, processing and even off-taking or operations with regards to our working with cooperatives.
“The main goal being to see the GBA turnaround from being a subverted institution to one that produces resources for the government, be it forex to dividends. And be assured that we are not just dreaming about raising our investment to 300 Billion Malawi Kwacha, but we have lined up immediate potential investments to bear fruit at least by 2030 so that we can play a good role in assisting government in registering successes of the MIP1,”explained Chidzungu.
Chidzungu further said Malawi has vast irrigable land that is yet to be developed, which if well utilized, coupled with adequate investment, could help in addressing food insecurity and foreign exchange shortages.
The CEO also said the authority has vested interest in increasing investments, promoting value addition and encourage large scale agricultural production to achieve the 300 Billion Malawi Kwacha Investment goal.
In implementation of its Strategic Plan, the Greenbelt Authority also wants to build the capacity of local farmers for them to properly play their roles in securing households from hunger and venture into agribusiness.
“We also want to properly structure the Green Belt Holdings Limited so that it can serve the purposes of the arrangements that we did in serving the government and the people, especially by addressing weaknesses that we have identified within the system over the past short period,” Chidzungu added.
At the end of the second quarter of 2023, the Greenbelt Authority had over 30 investors in its database, with whom they it was dealing, a thing that raises hope about the possibility of achieving the 500 Billion Malawi Kwacha Dream given continued investment partner engagements.
