DOHA – Malawi President Lazarus Chakwera has hailed the Least Developed Countries summit for adopting a safe, secure, and irreversible route towards moving out of the poverty tier and into middle income status.
He said this during the closing ceremony of the summit on the 5th United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), in Doha, Qatar which started on March 5th and ended on Thursday 9th March, 2023.
Chakwera said the summit has renewed commitment and hope for Malawi’s development agenda.
“Following the adoption of the Doha Political Declaration, all representatives from the 46 LDC member states head back to the respective jurisdictions to immediately start effecting deliverables as outlined in the Doha Programme of Action (DPoA) ,” Chakwera said.
He highlighted that the Programme of Action seeks to deliver among the key deliverables an online university, an investment promotion regime; a food stock holding mechanism; a crisis mitigation and resilience building mechanism; a graduation support package that ensures a smooth transition from the LCD category.
“Malawi, in particular, expects appropriate impact from various investments earmarked under the DPoA because it perfectly mirrors our Malawi 2063 First 10-Year Implementation Plan whose key milestones are raising the country’s income status to lower middle income level and attainment of most of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030,” he explained.
The Malawi leader further revealed that for LDCs to graduate into middle income category there is need to double efforts and more action to be done by financial institutions to ease access to resources by LDCs for the implementation of the programme.
“I am looking forward to a day near future when they will be no more LDCs summits and shared aspiration to graduate all of 46 Countries to middle income status,” Chakwera said.
Apart from the summit, Chakwera held a number of bilateral meetings which according to him, without doubt, the meetings will bear fruits in terms of foreign direct investment, trade opportunities and deeper cooperation.
