Made In Malawi
Made In Malawi
Malawi University of Science and Technology is emerging as an innovation wellspring, vaulting a nation of determined, talented people into the knowledge economy.
East of Malawi University of Science and Technology (MUST), just beyond the football pitch at the university’s south end, begins a wide expanse of open land rolling unbroken all the way to the horizon-splitting Mulanje Mountain. The land exudes promise: a suitable setting for MUST’s emergence as an innovation wellspring, yielding product, technology and systemic solutions to the country’s many challenges.
The next step, a potential game changer, is well underway: construction of the university’s much-anticipated laboratory complex and industrial park. The park’s manufacturing-research mix follows a familiar innovation ecosystem playbook, co-mingling scaling companies and startups with university researchers, students and entrepreneurs from across the region. The inclusion of resources like maker spaces and coaching improves everyone’s odds.
But this industrial park is different.
It’s different because the stakes couldn’t be higher. Malawi’s economy remains over-reliant on agriculture: the structural transition away from farming toward manufacturing and industrialization remains a protracted work in progress. By GDP measures, the country ranks among the 10 lowest per-capita incomes in the world. Other concerning socioeconomic indicators are easy to find.
But this post is not about reciting alarming statistics. It’s about the vast potential standing to be unleashed if fundamental shifts in national policy take flight at the local level, where the course of the country’s prospects — and those of its 20 million citizens — stand to radically improve. That story hinges upon what happens at MUST where, like everywhere else in the world, science and technology promise to upend the status quo.
Tackling the status quo is deeply connected to strategy and the creativity successful implementation demands, topics with which James Mphande, MUST’s Communications Manager, is clearly well-versed. In conversation about the university’s importance to the country, he consistently emphasizes the importance of connecting Malawi 2063 (MW2063) and its three pillars — agricultural productivity and commercialization, industrialization, and urbanization — to MUST’s ability to reliably deliver innovative solutions. James, an adept innovator in his own right, is ideally situated to narrate the university’s journey.
A unique story matched by a unique location.
Telling MUST’s story is inextricably linked to its location, and Malawi’s remarkable geography. Land-locked over 600 kilometres from the nearest seaport, it is tucked away in Africa’s southeast, bordering Zambia (west) and Tanzania (north and east). To the south, Mozambique wraps the country on all sides. Narrow and long, Malawi’s contours are geographically derived from the Great Rift Valley and Lake Malawi1.
MUST is about as far south within the country as one can get, a five hour drive down from capital Lilongwe, 45 minutes southeast of the nation’s commercial center, Blantyre, and nestled amidst a sea of tea estates. Created by an Act of Parliament in 2012, the location of the country’s fourth public university establishes a national presence—important for national cohesion—and demonstrates governmental commitment to solve endemic Southern Region economic and agricultural issues.
Ambitious Plans Need Practical, Strategic Solutions
Malawi 2063 calls for the nation to be an “inclusively wealthy and self-reliant industrialized upper-middle-income country by 2063.” Realizing these plans is to place prosperity and hope into the hands of 20 million Malawians, while providing direction and leadership to nations facing similar conditions.
We are coming up with programs that promote the national vision. Malawi is aiming at substituting imports so that we produce locally and export. We want to create industries where people produce things locally and reduce the weight of imports.
James Mphande, Malawi University of Science and Technology
It’s invitingly ambitious. Getting there will take some doing: in national development terms, 2063 is right around the corner.
Among the economic challenges, three stand out. Each links MUST’s research and innovation initiatives into the larger national picture, while making Malawi itself a fascinating case study of a nation making a thoughtful, determined leap to a knowledge-based economy.
Challenge One: Farming and Agriculture
Entrenched social, technological, and environmental barriers mean farmers often can’t maximize yield, nor can they sell their products efficiently, leading to higher prices and fewer people being fed. Local milk production averages 5 litres per day per cow; 15 litres is achievable in the region. Tripling milk production—and successfully getting it to market—carries profound health and economic promise.
Malawi is replete with similar examples. James explains that consumer prices on domestic goods go up when “Every day we are rationing power. For producers, if you want to produce the better part of the day, you have to use alternative power.”2
The complexity of the solutions required — which extend beyond individual technical projects into national socioeconomic challenges — mandate that MUST staff, students and academics cultivate not only a wide spectrum of technical, technological, and research specializations, but robust economic skills in design, manufacturing and market development. The scale of the country’s needs creates urgency to integrate the university’s research and economic development infrastructure into a knowledge-generation platform of sorts; a place capable of supplying an ever-expanding pipeline of homegrown solutions to the country’s barriers.
Amongst the issues, agriculture is perhaps the most pressing, dominated by the sheer scale of Malawi’s reliance on manual labour. The consequences extends beyond the economic. Farms and families — women do most of the maize and groundnuts shelling — can become marooned inside the grind of manual agriculture, with generational knock-on effects.
Close to 80 percent of the population rely on rain-fed smallholder agriculture for their livelihoods. — Malawi Vision 2063
MUST targets the problem at all levels, declaring on their site the aim to “promote development, adaptation, transfer and application of science, technology and innovation.” Researchers take this approach to the field3, assisting local innovators on micro-economic projects while tackling the larger macro-economic work demanded by MW2063.
The link between local and national, micro and macro, is unmistakable. At MUST, the Institute of Industrial Research and Innovation (MIIRI) and the Community Innovation Programme (CIP) are aimed squarely at societal issues. Amongst them: reducing dependence on manual labour, increasing productivity, and curbing spoilage. Examples include a groundnut and maize sheller,a poultry incubator monitoring app, and fortified maize flour production. Each is a potential difference maker to communities across the country.
MUST is building an expansive, foundational, agricultural research, technology and commercialization base tailored to Malawi’s specific needs.
What’s happening at MUST, however, is far from limited to product fixes for immediate problems, nor is it constrained to extending these solutions to the national scale. Including MIIRI, MUST is building an expansive, foundational agricultural research,4 technology, and commercialization base tailored to Malawi’s specific needs. This is apparent by examining an impressive range of projects, while considering the socioeconomic implications of building solutions domestically:
Food systems transformation research;
Irrigation: remote-control solar-powered system to detect soil and crop conditions and guide precise irrigation;
Design of an agricultural spraying drone;
E-commerce platform for agri-commodities;
GPS Planter: A fully automated seed planter for cereal and legume seeds, controlled by Global Positioning System.
What’s happening is that two inputs — an expanding range of solutions to local challenges and the university’s ever-growing collective scientific and technological expertise — are synthesizing into a wellspring of specialized knowhow. As more people are trained with this specialized knowhow, more projects can be tackled while also expanding the range and complexity of new projects.
MUST has been planning for this, as their vision makes clear:
A world-class centre of science and technology education, research and entrepreneurship [with the] mission of providing a conducive environment for quality education, training, research, entrepreneurship and outreach to facilitate economic growth in Malawi and beyond.
- Vision statement, Malawi University of Science and Technology
Specialized knowhow is the essential ingredient needed to make more and more complex products; the secret sauce that transitions an economy from manual and agricultural to automated and knowledge-based.
But it stands to reason that while possessing specialized knowhow is one thing, designing spaces to make the most of it — to plan for ever-expanding, sustained growth of that specialized knowhow — is another.
Enter the industrial park, the place where researchers, entrepreneurs, students, and community members come together to put that specialized knowhow to work, using labs, maker spaces, coaching, and industrial capacity to found new businesses, attract new partners, and open new avenues of enquiry. What’s particularly exciting is seeing the strategy in action: vital research, talented people, and infrastructure are coalescing around a base of specialized knowhow, maximizing the chances of MUST emerging as an innovation engine of national importance.
Challenge Two: Make More Complex Products
Creating more knowhow is the fundamental ingredient of economic development. This much is obvious. The more knowhow and the more varied the knowhow, the more complex products a place can make.
How one creates more knowhow is immediately complicated. Every country’s ability to grow its economy depends on its ability to produce successively more complex products. Kazakhstan imports smartphones because it lacks the knowhow and infrastructure to build and sell its own; thinking about what it would take for the Kazakhs to found a smartphone industry is to confront the problem faced by every nation, no matter its stage of economic development.
Malawi intends to be a “wealthy and self-reliant industrialized upper-middle-income country by 2063.” This mandates focusing on expanding the range and complexity of its products, a path usually resulting in higher wages, economic growth and social stability: this is Malawi University of Science and Technology’s raison d’etre.
Slow and Steady Wins the Race?
Without getting too deep into the weeds there is a conservative, logical, incremental way for economies to produce more complex products: examine what you do well today and jump to close or adjacent industries where existing skills and infrastructure may be leveraged. Jumps of this nature are therefore governed by connectedness: the extent to which existing knowhow and resources can used as the basis for strategic moves into related, but more complex, sets of products.
Some of MUST’s work falls into this camp, working with existing community strengths and knowhow in agricultural equipment falls into this category.
Limiting investment to conservative, incremental gains in product complexity in a world increasingly governed by knowledge economy principles leads to a potential irony. As the pace and shape of Malawi’s economic development is heavily influenced by implacable global forces (anything from trade wars to digital transformation) demand for entire categories of products could simply dry up, or domestic production become uncompetitive. An entirely conservative approach may, ironically, increase economic risk.
Further, absent support, Malawians with emerging skills in ICT, for example, may seek opportunities abroad. An exodus of talent is the last thing the country needs.
Challenge Three: Founding a Knowledge-Based Economy
Inarguably, automation is overwhelmingly important. Throughout the agriculture value chain, from crop science to irrigation, harvesting, food preservation and commercialization, added productivity offers life-changing benefits for farmers and consumers. Malawi’s ascension into an industrialized upper-middle-income country by 2063 is intrinsically linked to smart, strategic moves into more and more complex agricultural industry products.
MUST is laser focused on maximizing student potential, and propagating its specialized knowhow. James explains that, in addition to the academic curriculum, “What we are doing is promoting technology innovation. Our students are expected to put deliberate efforts into innovation. We have competitions; we encourage them to join innovation competitions, and so far we have won several awards. We are also making it mandatory in terms of entrepreneurship. Irrespective of one's program of study, there is always a module on entrepreneurship. Apart from that, no student graduates from MUST without undergoing industrial attachment related to the area of their study.”
Agtech. Made in Malawi.
The game-changer could prove to be agricultural technology (agtech). In many ways, it is the ideal complement to conservative, incremental gains in product complexity; a strategic bet in an area of vital need, where the seeds of specialized knowhow have already been planted.
Hardware and software agtech applications are needed throughout the entire agricultural value chain. It is as true in Malawi as anywhere that tech-enabled automation kicks off invaluable data, crucial for next-generation irrigation, planting, harvesting, food preservation, and commercialization inventions.
At MUST, specialized farming and agriculture knowhow is already present. Presaged by the individual projects already mentioned, a strategic move into agtech is entirely plausible. Advanced automation, Internet of Things sensors, and analytics powered by (increasingly) AI-enabled software could form the backbone and connective tissue of a powerful Made In Malawi agtech sector. Competitive advantages for the sector include solving the unique challenges of Malawian agriculture, the odds of which MUST is increasing by clustering in the industrial park.
It really is an inviting future. Getting there won’t be easy. But it is deeply exciting to contemplate a realistic future in which MUST scientists and engineers — gathered with founders, students, and community members — gaze out from industrial park building windows to see the fruits of their labour: fields, farms and tech extending from the university to the Mulanjie.
Part 2: With a clear strategy in place and supporting infrastructure under construction, Malawi University of Science and Technology is on course. Establishing domestic industries and thus reducing the reliance on imports requires cultivating markets for products, creating trust, and extending partner networks. These are among the challenges and opportunities ahead, discussed in the next MUST article.
Readers will recall Lake Malawi as world famous for its over 800 species of cichlids, one of the world’s most vivid examples of evolutionary adaptation, on par with Galapagos finches.
Wind power outages becomes full blown crises in times of drought. “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” tells the story of William Kamkwamba, whose ingenuity led him to “reason out how to build an electricity-producing windmill from spare parts and scrap, despite having no instructions.”