Minister of Information and Digitalization Moses Kunkuyu on Friday led hundreds of Malawians in launching Muuni Fund, which seeks to finance innovative ideas as the country is thriving to achieve digital transformation.
Kunkuyu has since called upon stakeholders to invest resources in the sector to enable Malawi achieve her dream for a technologically advanced country.
He observed that Malawi has many innovative young men and women, who are blessed with brilliant ideas, which are capable of transforming the nation, but lack of financial support to actualize their talents and actively contribute to the attainment of Malawi 2063.
“The Malawi 2063 agenda places digitalization as one pillar and the President has been saying it for a number of times and he keep on saying it that we have to go digital if we are to transform this country, because we can not talk of all the areas, like agriculture, tourism, mining without digitalization as an enabler then we are going to have slow registration of success in those areas, so as Malawi government in line with 2063 agenda we place Digitalization as a core enabler as well in the driver,” he said.
In her remarks, the Muuni team leader, Wezzi Salima, said the fund is focusing on providing solutions through financial support to those people that are interested in researches and innovations that are ICT related and she called upon all people having ideas either in agriculture or health to register with them.
“We have had a number of stakeholder engagement with the ministry of local government unity and culture, so we involved all 35 councils in Malawi and we interacted with them to share with us areas that they would like to be reached out, so we gave them five areas which are agriculture, health, banking, education and ICT so that they should look at these areas and see how the council should be supported through those,” Salima narrated.
The Muuni Research and Innovative Fund, established and being implemented by Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA) to the tuned of K410 million, is an Information Communication Technology (ICT) that aims at providing seed money to nurture and incubate local innovations across Malawi.
The fund has five key areas of focus, which are agriculture, health, education, banking as well ICT.