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Usaid aid freeze affects chamber
By
Ephraim Munthali - 27-03-2003 |
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A United States Agency for International Development (Usaid) aid package cut to the Malawi Confederation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry (MCCCI) last March resulted in the group losing K3 million in the year, the chamber said on Tuesday.
MCCCI outgoing president Jimmy Koreia-Mpatsa said at the chamber’s annual general meeting (AGM) in Blantyre that the freezing of the MCCCI/Usaid capacity building programme meant that the group’s plans were inconvenienced.
“We had budgeted that this project would run at least for the next two years in order to have an impact on the business environment,” said Koreia-Mpatsa, without stating how much Usaid was supposed to cough.
He, however, said the extension to the project was not granted, forcing the chamber to finance all the operations of the regional chambers from internally generated funds.
Koreia-Mpatsa explained that during this period, the Central and Northern Region chambers were just being set up and used funds generated from the confederation and Southern Region chamber.
“This implied that the resources from SRCCI and headquarters were now being shared with our new chambers as well. This created a situation of cost centres instead of revenues centres, hence the loss we incurred,” he said.
Koreia-Mpatsa, who has since resigned as chamber president to join active politics, added that the withdrawal of the Usaid money meant that there were no funds for organising fund-raising activities thereby closing doors for the budgeted expected income.
“This then meant the gap of expected revenue widened, hence the cost incurred as we still had to pay for fixed costs and other overheads. The total overall loss is about K3 million from a surplus of K700,000 last year,” he said.
According to the chamber’s financial statements, the group’s 2002 budget was estimated at K36.9 million against an actual income of K30 million. The total expenditure for the year was slightly over K38 million.
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