As Malawi is still in the process of domesticating as well as localising Sustainable Development Goals, Council For Non-Governmental Organisations – CONGOMA took a further step recently by organising Malawi National Civil Society Task Force on Sustainable Development Goals at Crossroads Hotel in Lilongwe in order to bring together NGOs and other interested parties to look at how government as well as other development stakeholders are localising global frameworks and regional frameworks and how Civil Society Organisations can contribute towards the success of relevant development strategies.

In an interview with CONGOMA Programmes Manager Simekinela Kaluzi Malawi has been amongst the 20 poorest countries for twenty years and what ought to be done now is to strategize how to curb this problem since there are already Sustainable Development Goals in place.

“What we need to do now is to establish linkage between the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy III and the Sustainable Development Goals. As members of the taskforce we are also expected to generate policy demands from this process, and after that we will be engaging various stakeholders including government to see how we can collaborate”, explained Kaluzi.

He further said “Civil Society Organisations are doing quite a lot in this regard, for example we have produced policy Papers around financing for development, Climate Change, and various engagement processes and we believe that by giving that we are contributing our opinions to the government of Malawi to look at how they implement local development strategies as well as International Development Strategies. What is key at this point is that as a country we need to set up efforts to make sure that we are moving in the right direction as most of our people are very poor”.

He therefore urged duty bearers to set their priorities right in as far as localising SDGs is concerned to avoid having scenarios of not meeting other targets as it was the case with the Millennium Development Goals where Malawi only achieved four goals out of the eight.

Taking his turn, Director of Programmes at World Vision Malawi Charles Chimombo presented key findings in the baseline Survey that the organisation conducted in the main areas such as Health and Nutrition, Food and Security as well as Water and Sanitation. According to Chimombo, the survey meant a lot as it would help World Vision know where to do better and also where to engage relevant stakeholders including the Government to improve on service delivery as well as help the community where the organisation works on.

Among the key findings World Vision found out that there were positive results in Health across all the areas in as far as attendance by pregnant women to go and deliver at the hospital was concerned as the findings showed nearer 100 percent compliance. As for Nutrition, stunting came out as the great concern as there were still one third of the children across the areas who were still stunted even high-level areas like Dedza and Mchinji where half of the children were still stunted.

For food and security, the baseline survey by World Vision indicated that access to insufficient food was nearly at 30 percent as children from those households reported having insufficient food to last them throughout the year.

Clarifying the findings on Water and Sanitation, Chimombo said “If you look at access to water and sanitation, on average is about 85 percent, that is good, other areas at 64 percent meaning in other areas, there are still about 30 percent of people who do not have access to potable water. However, Sanitation is a problem because only half of the people have access to sanitary facilities and hand washing behaviour is a problem, only 30 percent of the people demonstrated good hand washing behaviour”.

In education, the Director of programmes at World Vision Malawi Charles Chimombo summarised the findings as follows: “We looked at students who have access to early childhood development and students that can access pre-school before they go to primary school respectively. Only thirty percent have access to early childhood development and enrolment in primary school is satisfactory at over ninety percent. Although enrolment is satisfactory at 90 percent, there are other issues which need to be looked into for example transition rate from one class to another, we went in one primary school where there were 400 children in grade 1, at the same primary school, there were only 65 students in grade 8, and a few of them could go to a secondary school. Transition to go to another class is also an issue which needs urgent intervention”.

Commenting on localising SDGs, Chief Director responsible for Economic planning and Development in the Ministry of Finance, Economic Planning and Development Peter Simbani said Malawi had already embarked on the process of domesticating the SDGs from the Global to National Level.

“We are saying those SDGs are applicable to Malawi so we need to domesticate them so that they become part of the National Strategy and goals set for ourselves. The process of formulating the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy III took into account these International commitments that we have made as a country and we are pleased that the MGDS III has now been printed out”, explained Simbani.

He further said that Malawi would in the first quarter of 2018 going to have the SDG baseline. “The baseline gives you starting point for you to monitor progress. First of all, we need to establish the baseline figures, baseline statistics, and then able to monitor the progress. Since the baseline would be ready by the end of this year’s first quarter then we will be able to produce a monitoring report by end August, because then we will have the starting point which is the baseline that we are creating”, stressed Simbani.

On 25 September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, along with a new set of development goals that are collectively called the Sustainable Development Goals. The Agenda is a culmination of many years of negotiation and was endorsed by all 193 member-nations of the General Assembly both developed and developing—and applies to all countries.
It is important to note that the predecessor of SDGs, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) faced financing challenges; they faced inadequacies in spurring industrialization that creates growth of the economies and that MDGs were only 8 in number and now there are 17 SDGs. The big question is how will the SDGs address these challenges that were met by MDGs.