National Local Government Finance Committee (NLGFC) has urged councils across the country to expand their revenue collection sources to achieve annual targets and boost local financial performance.
NLGFC’s Capacity Development Officer, Louis Sichali, made the remarks in Nkhata Bay District during the technical dissemination of the 2024 Local Authority Performance Assessment (LAPA) results to Nkhata Bay District Council, which moved from position 16 to 7 this year.
According to Sichali, councils are generally underperforming in local revenue generation because of over reliance on market revenues, which are relatively small and unsustainable, hence the need to widen their revenue base through innovative sources.
“We came to do technical dissemination of the 2024 LAPA results, which are based on all the accountability areas assessed in the framework. One of the key areas is the performance in locally generated revenue. Overall, councils are struggling to generate adequate local revenue which is negatively affecting their performance”, he said.
Acting Director of Development and Planning for Nkhata Bay, Emmanuel Kanjawala, expressed pride in the results and commitment to further success in the next cycle.
“Teamwork and collaboration helped us perform better in the LAPA results, and we’re grateful for this achievement,” he said.
Kanjawala further said that the council has started reviewing by-laws to help reinforce their local revenue collection efforts.
In the 2024 LAPA results, Neno District Council ranked first with a score of 93 percent and Nkhata Bay District Council scored 82 percent, qualifying for K876 million under Governance to Enable Service Delivery (GESD) and K476 million under Resilience and Recovery Capacity Program Phase Two (RCRP2), with support from the World Bank
By Chisomo Kambandanga, MANA
