Minister of Local government, unity, and culture Richard Chimwendo Banda has called upon councils to prioritize flagship projects, saying these can have a quicker social and economic impact on people.

He made the remarks Tuesday in Dowa during an engagement meeting with councillors and council secretariats, aimed at strengthening their capacity on identifying and implementing flagship and full package projects under the development budget, like Governance to Enable Service Delivery (GESD) project.

Banda said some councils are concentrating on a few big projects with a quicker social-economic impact, while others allocate resources to many small projects based on either constituencies or wards, but with little social-economic impact.

“The plea we are making to councils and members of parliament is that we utilize the resources we are getting under GESD to implement flagship projects, rather than spreading them thinly whereby at the end of the day, we do not see major impacts.

“We have convinced councilors that this does not stop them from getting some projects in their wards and constituencies because Constituency Development Fund (CDF) will always be there for that. But GESD and District Development Fund (DDF) should be concentrated on flagship projects,” said the Minister.

In his remarks, Charles Chunga, project coordinator for the GESD project, which is being implemented under the National Local Government Finance Committee (NLGFC), said GESD has so far managed to address some challenges councils have been facing, ranging from infrastructure development to capacity building.

“We have been implementing this project for almost three years. But from our assessment, we have noted that some councils are implementing very small projects that do not have an impact to the citizens.

“So the proposal is they should come up with flagship projects complete with all necessary supporting facilities because we have noted that some projects have been completed but are not functional due to lack of essential facilities for them to be operational,” he said.

Reported by Sylvester Kumwenda, District Information Officer, Dowa