Malawian youth should begin to claim the digital space- Suleman
MACRA Director General, Daud Suleman, has said it is time for Malawian youth to start claiming the digital space as the country strives to achieve the Malawi 2063 agenda.
Suleman said the future is digital, the future is youth, opportunities have gone digital and the world is moving in the fourth industrial revolution and it is not waiting for the youth of Malawi to wake up. Therefore, they must begin to claim the digital spaces and must begin to be very meaningful in their digital engagements.
He was speaking at Grand Palace Hotel in Mzuzu on Wednesday during a National Youth Conversations Series 3 as the youth were commemorating the 2024 National Youth Day under the theme “Bridging the Digital Divide: Are Malawian youth ready to lead the Digital Revolution towards Malawi 2063?”
“As MACRA, we are constructing brand new computer laboratories in all constituencies in Malawi. These will agitate demand for digital services and skills and therefore we need to start building a pool of Malawians that will have digital skills. To achieve this, we have engaged the Ministry of Education to revise the school curriculum so that we can introduce Computer Programming at secondary school level in order to begin to produce data scientists and computer programmers for us to create a bigger pool of digital skills that we can then export,” explained Suleman.
He added that MACRA was still engaging service providers to ensure that they make data bundles affordable and that efforts were being made to see to it that smart phones can be assembled in this country in order to reduce their prices thereby giving access to Malawians in the use of smart phones.
Director of Science, Technology and Innovation at the Ministry of Education, Associate Professor Chomola Mikeka, said work is being done to ensure that there is penetration to have internet connectivity in all schools by 2030.
“We have many players under this programme including MACRA, Airtel, UNICEF, Universal Service Fund and many others. We know that out of 6,954 primary schools in Malawi, 66% (4,020) are not electrified. For secondary schools, out of 1,774, only 18% are not electrified. We therefore shared files with our colleagues in the Ministry of Energy to include these schools in Malawi Rural Electrification Programme (MAREP),” explained Associate Professor Mikeka.
Board Chairperson for the National Youth Council of Malawi, Duncan Chiyani, said young people should make tangible contributions towards the development of the country.
“We hold these conversation series to allow the youth to make resolutions that can be taken up in the development of this country,” he said.
The first and second series took place in Blantyre and Liongwe, respectively.
Currently, 14 million SIM cards are active in Malawi and 36.9% of Malawians use the internet. Out of these 14 million SIM cards, only one million are on smart phones while 13 million are on non smart phones.
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