Malawi stands to benefit immensely from training on the IPRT

22 February, 2022

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Lilongwe, Malawi, 22 February 2022 (ECA) - Malawi government stands to benefit from the training on the Integrated Planning and Reporting Toolkit (IPRT) developed by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) to support Member States in aligning continental and global commitments like Agenda 2063 and the 2030 agenda with national priorities and aspirations.

In his opening remarks, Bartholomew Armah, Acting Director of the Macroeconomics and Governance Division at UNECA, noted that the training which began on Tuesday makes Malawi a second country in the southern Africa region to receive the training after Botswana which completed its virtual training on November 4, 2021.

Armah observed that “The timing of this training is therefore ideal since you are at the early stage of implementing the country’s First Ten-year Implementation Plan (2021 – 2030) of the Malawi 2063. The training offers an opportunity to evaluate the quality of your plan from the perspective of aligning national development priorities with continental and global commitments”.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is a health crisis with significant economic ramifications for the global economy but African countries have been particularly affected as the continent suffered its first recession in decades. The unprecedented events caused by the pandemic make it even more important to strengthen our planning capacities. We believe that the IPRT can contribute to this objective”, he added.

Speaking at the opening of the training, Thomas Chataghalala Munthali, Director General, Malawi’s National Planning Commission (NPC) said that it is important for a country to domesticate commitments at the international level in order to move forward, saying, “As a country, we have made a decision not to look at ourselves in terms of our aspirations but align and harmonize with continental and global aspirations too”.

According to Munthali, moving forward, the training becomes even more important as to how Malawi moves to align the issues at a decentralised level so that the aspirations contained in the Malawi 2063 get to be devolved at local levels.

Once the national plan data is uploaded in the IPRT system, the toolkit can be used to generate an alignment report which will indicate in percentages, the level of alignment at the goal, target, and indicator levels. This will inform the Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs) report of the country. Malawi has since become one of the volunteer countries to prepare VNRs in 2022.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Resident Coordinator a.i. to Malawi, Rudolf Schwenk in his remarks said that the tool is important because economic growth and socio-economic development at both continental and individual country levels require periodic assessment of progress which is imperative for evidence-based planning and implementation of interventions.

Schwenk noted “This training is therefore particularly important as a basis for anchoring periodic assessment of progress, and to inform the development of attendant interventions to address inhibitors or undercurrents to progress”.

The Integrated Planning and Reporting Toolkit is a web-based multi-level platform developed by UNECA to assist member states to integrate regional and global agendas into national development plans. The tool also assists Member States to synchronize, measure and track progress in attaining both Agenda 2030 and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and Agenda 2063 for the African Union.

Through this tool, Member States can simultaneously track progress towards the seven aspirations of Agenda 2063, 17 goals and 169 targets of Agenda 2030. Such tracking of progress is particularly important for planning, assessing progress and reporting.

Issued by:
The Sub-Regional Office for Southern Africa
UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA)
P.O. Box 30647, Lusaka, Zambia.

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