By Sellah Singini

Lilongwe, July 18, Mana: Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA) has disclosed its plan of establishing an acceleration centre for innovators in the country under the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Alliance for Digital Development.

MACRA’s Muuni Fund Team Lead, Wezi Salima disclosed this on Wednesday at Bingu International Convention Centre (BICC) in Lilongwe when MACRA engaged innovators on the idea of establishing the acceleration centre.

She said the aim of the acceleration centre was to build a biggest centre for all Malawians innovators and entrepreneurs to be able to be incubating and accelerating their ideas through the collaboration of the different ecosystem players under innovation.

“The aim of what MACRA is trying to do through the Muuni fund is that we push for innovation and entrepreneurship not only from the MACRA fund by involving other stakeholders that have interest of building an acceleration centre,” Salima said.

“What we have noted is that the innovation ecosystem is quite space whereby people are doing things individually, so there is need for collaboration for each stakeholder to be able to understand what other stakeholders are doing and how we can partner with each other,” she added.

According to Salima Malawi under MACRA has been selected as one of the 17 countries to host and establish an acceleration centre by the International Telecommunication Unit (ITU).

One of the innovators, Sarah Khuze said the acceleration centre would give the innovators in the country an opportunity, resources and support to accelerate their ideas to enable them sell their products locally and globally.

“As innovators, we have been crying for funding to scale up our ideas and we believe that the acceleration centre will give us funding and the networking opportunities to accelerate our ideas,

What we want is to have products that can stand on the international market. And we believe that the centre will give us a platform where we can sell our products locally and globally,” she said.

Khuze called upon policy makers who would be part of the acceleration centre to implement policies that would help innovators to scale up their ideas and grow.