Digitalization a great enabler to achieve sustainable goals
Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority, (MACRA) says Malawi as one of the land locked and least developed countries requires digitalization as its great enabler in order to achieve it’s sustainable development goals by the year 2030.
MACRA director general Daudi Suleman lamented that Malawi is currently in a situation whereby alot of people are not connected to the internet as the country is sitting at 34.6 percent of Malawians who are connected to the internet in the population of 20 million people and that 73 percent of Malawian has the potential to connect to the internet that can also help to unlock new opportunities and the economy of this country.
He was saying this at the opening of a two-day International Telecommunications Union, (ITU) regional workshop on cost models for data services and international internet connectivity where his organization is hosting.
“We are an agro-based economy and you have seen the effects of climate change, cyclone freddy and the way El Nino is affecting us, without digitalization as a country we cannot be in a position to prepare ourselves for such eventualities but with digitalization and with the use of data we will be in a position to forewarn ourselves that in the next twelve months we are not going to have a good maize harvest maybe we should plant cassava because we have the data and in so doing we are going to have food security, food sufficient but most importantly good life for our people,” Suleman said.
Minister of information and digitalization Moses Kumkuyu who was the guest honor said digitalization is a very crucial area in as far as the development of this country is concern but this is becoming hard as the cost of internet connectivity is high, and this time Malawi is previledged to host this event in order to discuss the issue of cost models across the global.
“Malawi is lanked as the lowest market of data in Africa, we are the most affordable when it comes to data and internet connectivity, we would want other countries to learn from that as we also put that as a global treand that everyone should be connected and Malawi we don’t want to be left behind we want everyone to be connected but the issue of data cost has to be priotized,” he said.
The workshop will run until 10th April, 2024 with participants from across ITU member states globally as well as various industry players from Malawi including mobile network providers.
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