By Vincent Gunde

The Local Authority Performance Assessment (LAPA) has rated Dowa District Council one of the best performing councils in Malawi in areas of development planning, procurement, financial management and accounting, health service delivery, among others.

As one of the best, Dowa District Council will be one of the councils to access development grants from the World Bank funded -Governance to Enable Service Delivery (GESD) to implement various projects to benefit the poor in the district.

Out of 28 District Councils in Malawi, 3 councils have failed to access GESD funds because they failed the minimum access conditions due to underperformance, poor performance, misuse of project funds and many other reasons.

Speaking during a District Executive Committee (DEC) meeting held at the Dowa boma, the Council’s Director of Planning and Development Mercy Mpakule, thanked organizations implementing their various interventions in the district and government sector heads for contributing to the success of the council as one of the best performing in Malawi.

Mpakule said a number of councils did well, Dowa got an overall score of 72 percent in areas of access to information, audit and audit issues, financial and physical progress reporting, financial management and accounting, Health service delivery and procurement.

She said the council performed poorly in the Education and service delivery scoring 20 percent calling on partners and education stakeholders to work together for one unity of purpose to support the education sector to do well.

The DPD said the major issues arising from LAPA were Development Service Committee meetings not prioritizing investment projects for approval by the Full Council, schools not supervised and inspected regularly and teachers not equitably deployed across the district.

She said as putting a way forward, the council has already commenced self-assessments for the assessed sectors and is remaining with 3 sectors (Agriculture, Works and Education) saying the council is targeting to score above 90 percent as the next assessment is to start from 18th September, 2023.

“Very few councils performed well in access to information with Dowa getting a sore of 67 percent, we are also not vigilant in revenue collections,” said Mpakule.

Mpakule said most Local Authorities failed to adequately hold site progress meetings, issuance of certificates not completely done, failed to collect the locally generated revenues as per budget, failed to resolve audit issues and not all the SIG funds were disbursed timely by the Local Authorities.