The Leadership Lab with Dr. Vera Kamtukule

Malawi’s innovation challenge is not simply that the country lacks ideas. It is that too many ideas remain trapped outside the systems that can turn them into jobs, exports, infrastructure, and national growth.

Data presented at the ECAMA Conference in Lilongwe in June 2026 placed Malawi at approximately 125th out of 139 countries on the Global Innovation Index, positioning the country within the bottom tier of assessed economies. The same brief highlighted that Malawi’s Knowledge and Technology Output score remains far below both the Sub-Saharan African average and the global innovation frontier.

Yet the story is not only one of deficit.

Approximately 44 percent of Malawians are estimated to have foundational digital skills. That represents more than 8 million people — a digitally capable population larger than the total population of several advanced economies. The question, then, is not whether Malawi has talent. The question is whether the country has built the systems needed to activate it.

This was the focus of a recent episode of The Leadership Lab, hosted by Dr. Vera Kamtukule PhD — Executive Coach, author, and former Cabinet Minister — featuring Nthanda Manduwi, Founder and Executive Director of Kwathu Kollective and Q2 Systems.

In the conversation, Dr. Kamtukule and Manduwi explored Malawi’s innovation gap through the lens of leadership, digital skills, systems thinking, and institutional readiness. The discussion examined why Malawi continues to underperform in formal innovation indicators, despite having a young population, growing digital capability, and a long history of informal problem-solving.

Manduwi also reflected on the origin story of Kwathu.

Before Kwathu became an organization, it began as storytelling. While studying at the University of Malawi, Manduwi started as a blogger and digital content creator, documenting Malawi from a perspective she felt was missing. Global narratives often reduced the country to poverty, crisis, and limitation. Yet the Malawi she knew was also beautiful, intelligent, creative, and full of possibility.

That work became By Ntha, then evolved into fellowships, digital skills programming, youth innovation work, and eventually the Ntha Foundation and Kwathu Kollective. What began as personal storytelling grew into a digital capability movement, later supported through the World Bank-backed Digital Malawi ecosystem.

Through Kwathu, Manduwi helped establish an innovation hub, build a team, train over 10,000 young people, and create practical pathways for digital skills development. The work expanded into gamified learning, creative economy programming, tourism storytelling, entrepreneurship, and applied innovation.

Her later experience with the United Nations widened the lens further. Working across evaluation, knowledge systems, and international development made clear that digital skills alone were not enough. Communities also needed access to food systems, infrastructure systems, logistics systems, learning systems, and production systems.

That realization shaped the next evolution of Kwathu’s work.

After joining Michigan State University for her MBA, and later Microsoft Xbox as a Business Development intern, Manduwi began connecting Kwathu’s gamified learning history with simulation, agriculture, and systems design. Games, she observed, could do more than entertain. They could help people understand complex systems — incentives, logistics, infrastructure, production, coordination, and resilience — in ways that reports and dashboards often cannot.

This became the foundation for Kwathu Smart Innovation Farms.

KSIF brings together gamified learning, agriculture, simulation, autonomous systems, and real-world training. It is designed as a simulation-first food systems platform that begins with a game, expands into training and institutional learning, and connects over time to real farms, digital twins, autonomous tools, and smart infrastructure.

The conversation on The Leadership Lab was more that a personal founder story. It was a broader discussion about Malawi’s future.

How does a country move from potential to performance? How does it turn digital skills into economic output? How does it ensure that young people are not only trained for the digital economy, but equipped to shape the real economy?

For Kwathu Kollective, this is now the central evolution of the work:

We started by training young people for the digital economy. We are now building the simulation and infrastructure tools that can help them shape the real economy.

Watch the full conversation with Dr. Vera Kamtukule and Nthanda Manduwi premieres today on The Leadership Lab at 8:00 PM CAT.

Work With Us

Want to partner on or fund one of our programmes / initiatives? We are always open to collaborations and partnerships. Contact us via kollective@kwathu.org.