Chief executive officer for MMD, Dye Mawindo, who is leading a seven- member Malawi delegation to Washington DC, USA, told reporters that the new compact is set to be signed towards the end of next year.

“We are looking at more or less towards the end of 2021 before we can have a compact for a second programme signed and implementation probably starting between January and February 2022.

"It is still a long journey and lots of work to be undertaken, but we remain confident that we will do our part in terms of fast tracking this process," he said.

“But when all is said and done the amount of preparatory work that needs to happen is huge that there’s little hope of finishing this job within 2020,” said Mawindo.

For the past eight months MCC officials from USA have been frequenting the country, working closely with MMD officials, to identify potential areas where MCC, an agency of the USA Government would invest in the second compact.

Mawindo highlighted that currently MMD is working on a concept note detailing key challenges affecting the country and outlining strategic options for handling them.

According to Mawindo two key issues coming out clearly are access to land and farm to market linkages.

He said : “What the latter or second constraints envisioning is the fact that productivity and production is low at farm level or smallholder farmers also experience huge amount of obstacles in getting their produce or commodities to the market.”

The $350 million first compact, signed in 2011 and which was implemented from 2013-2018,  was designed to modernise Malawi’s electricity infrastructure by broadening the capacity to accommodate future investments in the power sector and was also intended to reduce poverty by improving the availability, reliability and quality of power supply, expanding access to power and reducing the cost of doing business among other deliverables.