Malawi’s Ministry of Information and Digitalization has launched Muuni Fund which focuses on financing innovative ideas as the country thrives to achieve digital transformation. The launch which was held on Friday and gathered hundreds of Malawians was led by Moses Kunkuyu, the Minister of Information and Digitalization.

In order to help Malawi realize its vision of being a technologically advanced nation, Kunkuyu has since urged stakeholders to invest resources in the area.

He noted that Malawi has many creative young people endowed with bright ideas capable of revolutionizing the country, but who need the financial backing to actualize their abilities and actively contribute to the realization of Malawi 2063.

“The Malawi 2063 agenda places digitalization as one pillar and the President has been saying for a number of times and keeps 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.

Wezzi Salima, the head of the Muuni team, stated in her remarks that the fund aims to address problems by offering financial support to those who are interested in ICT-related research and innovations. She urged everyone with ideas for improving agriculture or healthcare to register with the fund.

According to Salima, “We have had a number of stakeholder engagements with the ministry of local government unity and culture, so we involved all 35 councils in Malawi and interacted with them to share with us areas that they would like to be reached out to. 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.”

The Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA) established and is implementing the K410 million Muuni Research and Innovative Fund, an Information Communication Technology (ICT) that intends to provide seed money to nurture and incubate local inventions throughout Malawi.

The fund has five main areas of focus: banking, ICT, agriculture, health, and education.