Meet Malawi’s Innovation Champion, Rachel Sibande, the Founder of Malawi’s first Technology Hub
Rachel Chimwemwe Sibande is a Malawian technology expert, computer scientist, STEM educator, social entrepreneur, innovator and the founder of her country’s first technology hub, mHub which she launched in November 2013.
mHub is an incubator for emerging technology startups with a special focus on building young technology enthusiasts and entrepreneurs through training, skills development and mentorship.
Through mHub, Rachel has been able to impact over 40,000 young innovative entrepreneurs with digital and entrepreneurial skills to champion and develop sustainable business solutions. mHub created an entrepreneurship curriculum and implemented projects aimed at supporting promising entrepreneurs on three tier pillars: Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Apart from the Hub, Rachel is a chairperson at Girl Effect Malawi and a Board member at GiveDirectly Malawi. Since the establishment of mHub, Rachel has championed the development and deployment of innovative technology solutions across fields such as Elections Monitoring, Citizen management and Agriculture in Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Rachel has over a decade of industry experience spanning academia, development and social enterprise domains.
In 2012, Rachel became an alumna of former United States President, Barack Obama’s Young African Leaders Initiative and she later delivered a TED talk in 2013 on the subject of using technology for agricultural development.
In 2015, she received the Anita Borg Scholarship from Google, now called TechWomen Scholarship program and in 2016, she was listed by Forbes magazine as one of Africa’s promising entrepreneurs under the age of 30.
In 2017, she became one of the 14 youth who were honored by the Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi at Egypt’s first World Youth Forum (WYF) for establishing Malawi’s first ever innovation hub and incubator and In 2018, she won the first prize on her pitch concerning generation of electricity from maize cobs using a thermal chemical process at the Next Einstein Forum (NEF) Global Gathering in Rwanda and in 2019, Rachel was listed by Forbes Woman Africa as one of the new wealth creators.
Rachel is a woman of many achievements, both in the technological and energy space and is making her presence felt in both fields and in Africa as a continent.
