By Vincent Gunde
The Dowa District Council’s Director of Planning and Development Mercy Mpakule, says the council is appreciating the support it is getting from partners complimenting government efforts of delivering the social services in the district.
Mpakule said while the council is appreciating this development role by partners, there is a great need for partners and the Secretariat to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) saying this enhances transparency, cooperation and accountability of projects which are being implemented in the district.
She said it is sad that while partners are doing a commendable job of uplifting the lives of the Dowa people, many partners have not signed MoU with the council describing this as very retrogressive not only to the council but the communities they serve.
Speaking when she presented a Local Authority Performance Assessment (LAPA) to the District executive committee on Thursday, Mpakule said LAPA is conducted to determine whether or not the Local Authority has the fundamental capacities and safeguards to manage development grants.
Mpakule said LAPA provides fiscal incentives to improve Local Authority performance by rewarding good performance as well as penalizing poor performance in the performance areas of development planning and budgeting, procurement management, project implementation, improving access to information, and mobilization of locally generated revenues, among others.
She said in the 2022/2023 Financial Year, all the 28 Local Authorities passed the minimum access conditions in the LAPA, adhered to spending eligibly in compliance with the GESD project and DDF and also prepared and submitted annual financial statements for the previous year to the National Local Government Finance Committee.
The DPD said the Dowa District Council performed very well in procurement management where it maintained its 2022 score of 100 percent and dropped in the area of development planning and budgeting from 86 percent in 2022 to 60 percent in 2023.
“Improvement in Education Service Delivery moved from 20 percent in 2022 to 100 percent in 2023, we have to clap hands to ourselves, the council’s total average score is 84 percent making it the number one council in Malawi,” said Mpakule.
She has finally appealed to partners implementing their interventions in the district to support each other so that projects they are implementing in the district are done in the interest of all.
The Dowa District Council has over 35 Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) implementing various projects, most of these are concentrating in Dowa West which is a flat land than Dowa East which is hilly and has impassable roads.
