Malawi Action Plan for the Open Government Partnership 2023-2025

Country / jurisdiction: Malawi · Year: 2023 · Status: In force · Level: National · Type: Voluntary

The Action Plan aims to enhance transparency in Malawi's natural resource chain, addressing issues in the contracting and licensing processes, revenue and expenditure disclosure and environmental governance. Previously, the Malawi government already required the disclosure of mining development agreements and licences and implemented EITI. With this Action Plan, the government aims to:

further enhance transparency across the entire natural resource chain,

promote active and critical citizen involvement in transparency,

improve ability to collect government payments

promote efficient negotiation and management of extraction agreements,

ensure stronger protections against financial crimes and greater access to international markets.

The government committed to the following solutions to complement their current transparency framework:

Creation of a regulatory framework for natural resource contracts and beneficial owner disclosure, with parliamentary committee scrutiny.

Establishment of a sovereign fund with transparent rules for deposits and withdrawals.

Scrutiny of draft contracts by the parliamentary committee during the contracting process.

Milestones for the Action Plan include:

Enhanced regulatory framework for the mining sector.

Improved role of parliament and oversight institutions.

Creation of a mining sovereign fund.

Disclosure of all contracts and licenses in the extractive industries.

Disclosure of all beneficial owners of entities in the extractive industries.

As background, the problems identified include opacity in the natural resource chain, particularly in mining contracts, leading to perceptions of economic inefficiency and corruption. Additionally, citizen engagement is hindered by a lack of accessible information and misinformation. The proposed solutions involve creating a regulatory framework, establishing a sovereign fund and involving parliamentary committees in contract scrutiny and fiscal regime optimisation. The desired outcomes include improved transparency, citizen engagement and accountability in the natural resource sector.

Official source: https://www.opengovpartnership.org/members/malawi/commitments/MW0010/