By Wilfred Golden

Ministry of Transport and Public Works is optimistic that through Southern Africa Trade and Connectivity Project (SATCP), the country is going to open up trade by removing barriers to trade within Malawi and international market particularly using Nacala and Beira corridors as the country thrives to increase agricultural exports.

Deputy Director in the Department of Policy and Planning in the Ministry of Transport and Public  Works Charles Mtonga said the project seeks to address barriers to trade arranging from physical barriers like infrastructure which includes roads and ports as well as non-tax barriers which include procedures and strategies that countries use to facilitate trade.

Mtonga was saying this during a two day media orientation on SATCP in Mponela.

“As we open up the corridors we will make it bigger and better so as to increase flow of traffic. We have also to look at our exports production as we are working on making our corridors better, so in this project we have a sub-component which is looking at production using the SMEs as the project stipulates, so through the funding from World Bank in this project we are working in providing grants to the identified producers who are SMEs to produce more in increasing our value chain aiming at expanding our export base,”Mtonga said.

Through funding from World Bank, the project seeks to support Malawi and Mozambique in increasing regional trade coordination, reducing trade costs and time as well as developing regional value chains, and improving access to infrastructure.

Hastings Ngoma who is SATCP project manager said all these efforts are going towards reducing trade costs which will require them to look on things like improving infrastructure by building roads.

“We also want to improve the way we do business as this project will involve our partners who are international agencies mainly working in our boarders as we have fourteen implementing agencies.

“We also want to increasing technological advancement in our boarders by reducing manual work as we will introduce systems with our colleagues in agriculture sector as well as Malawi Bureau Standards as one of our implementing agency like how our colleagues in the department of immigration are doing as they are implementing project such as boarder pass system as well as boarder management information system and with our colleagues from agriculture sector we are going to have a system where all business transaction will be done automatic, so we believe this will improve our way of doing business,” Ngoma said.

SATCP is a 6-year World Bank funded project to the tune of 150 million US dollars which started on  June 1, 2021 and is expected to be finalized by  July 31, 2027.

The project is believed to improve regional integration, contribute to structural transformation, job creation and poverty reduction.

The Ministry of Transport is leading in implementation of non-infrastructure  component of the project whereas Roads Authority is leading in implementing infrastructure components of the project which include roads, boarder post, and inland examination centers.

Among other implementing agencies are department of trade, department of agricultural research services, National Construction Industry Council (NCIC), Malawi Revenue Authority (MRA), Roads Authority as well as Malawi Bureau of Standards(MBS), just to mention afew.