March 8 is International Women's Day (IWD). The day allows us to widely discuss and update our commitment to achieving gender equality and women's and girls' rights. With this year's theme “Invest in women: Accelerate progress,” Mzuzu E-Hub would like to celebrate IWD with amazing women in our community while featuring some of the key activities we have been working on.
Women at Mzuzu E-Hub
We are an entrepreneurship and innovation hub based in Mzuzu, Malawi, founded by a vibrant woman entrepreneur: Wangiwe Joanna Kambuzi. Under her leadership, our team has been investing in women's empowerment and participation in the digital economy through skills development, enterprise support, and access to digital technologies in Malawi. Many of our activities are based on two signature programs: (1) Media Information Literacy Education (MILE) for cultivating digital skills, and (2) Bizcubation for developing ICT entrepreneurship.
From the MILE program, meet Juliet Manda, Mzuzu E-Hub's Technology Integration Officer at our Rumphi remote hub. With a degree in Computer Systems and Security obtained from Malawi University of Science and Technology, Juliet runs the MILE digital skills training program in the Rumphi District in Northern Malawi. She trains passionate young people in the community and unlocks fellow women's socio-economic opportunities in the era of ICT.
Juliet (standing), working with her trainees at a computer graphics class.
Through the experience working at Mzuzu E-Hub, she has “been able to grow economically [...] to assist my family and now even planning to establish a small business in my home village,” in her own words; currently, women empowerment in the villages is Juliet's one of the biggest interests and something she wants to explore with Mzuzu E-Hub as a future opportunity.
Promoting STEM careers among women and girls
As Juliet and other program participants have achieved, promoting women's and girls' careers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) is one of the key initiatives at the core of MILE. Here, together with Sarah Khudze, a woman role model and Founder of Reach Out to Girls, Mzuzu E-Hub recently organized an event called Girls x Digital Technology. We invited 30 girls from the local youth clubs and sensitized them to the effective and safe use of digital technologies and their career implications.
Group photo from the Girls x Digital Technology event, with Sarah Khudze (sitting on a chair, middle) and Mzuzu E-Hub's Technology Integration Coordinator Twambilile Mwalwanda (sitting on a chair, second from the right).
Incubating women-led businesses
Under the Bizcubation program, meanwhile, we have been working with a diverse range of male and female entrepreneurs in various sectors. Maggie Alinane Msowoya (picture on the right), for example, currently runs several businesses with a particular focus on school operations and contributes to the economy of Malawi through its underlying educational system. She testified that “Mzuzu E-Hub equipped me with knowledge that has helped my business grow. Without its trainings[,] I know my business would have lacked direction in certain areas.” Her education business unlocks further opportunities for young mothers and girls so they can sustain their lives with the right knowledge and skills.
As a next step, Maggie, along with the other program participants, mentioned that there is room for improvement in women's accessibility to business training and funding opportunities. To respond to the need, in 2023, we designed Women in Biz, a special Bizcubation cohort tailored to women entrepreneurs and women-led businesses. Yet, the competitive nature of the business incubation process still does not allow us to support enough women in the communities, and hence Mzuzu E-Hub will continuously explore how to accelerate the progress more inclusively.
Maggie Alinane Msowoya, a woman entrepreneur from Mzuzu E-Hub's community.
#InvestInWomen
Through the MILE and Bizcubation program, Mzuzu E-Hub has been investing in women's empowerment and participation in the digital economy. With the feedback from the program participants, we continuously refine the approaches so that the impact on gender equality and social inclusion can be maximized. Moreover, we keep adding new programs and projects to our portfolio, such as Zantchito and Kukolola, which further increase our reach to the women population in Malawi and beyond.
Happy IWD 2024, and stay tuned for more of these stories as we continue to celebrate Women's History Month this March.
