Mutharika salutes TNM’s Smart Challenge winners

Malawi’s president Professor Arthur Peter Mutharika has congratulated four Malawian students who were recently in the Silicon Valley, USA after the TNM Smart Challenge ICT competition.

While in US the young students  met one of the world’s most admired 21st century ICT guru, the founder and CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg at this year’s Global Developer’s conference held in San Francisco, California.

The four Panashe Jere, Daniel Mvalo, Walter Moyo and Thandie Magasa were in USA for a 10 day after emerging the winners of country’s first ever ICT competition ,TNM Smart Challenge.

Jere, a 10-year old Grade 6 six pupil from Christian Heritage Primary School in Lilongwe, won in the Smart Kid category of the competition after developing an application, ‘Talk To Me’, while the trio developed a health service app, ‘Martenitech’ in the Smart Student category.

In his congratulatory message posted on his Facebook page, Mutharika said the achievements at the Facebook F8 conference in Silicon Valley were an inspiration to young people.

“The first lady and I would like to congratulate the young Malawians who recently made headlines for their innovations. The stories of Panashe, Walter, Daniel and Thandie and their achievements at the Facebook F8 Conference in Silicon Valley is inspiration to other young and budding software developers and Malawi’s youth in general,” said Mutharika.

Mutharika who is also UNFPA Global Champion for the youth encouraged other young people to be innovative.

“We are pleased with how the four flew high the Malawi flag on the international stage at the F8 conference,” he said  

Commenting on the president message, one of the winners Walter Moyo described president’s remarks as inspiration.

“It’s inspiring to have our efforts being recognised by the first citizen and we feel humbled and encouraged. Once again let me thank TNM for this innovative competition that really exposed our talents on international level,” said Moyo.

The team toured Facebook, Google, Apple and Stanford University and also attended an ICT International conference in San Francisco, California. They departed on April 9 and returned home on April 18, 2016.

Launched on October 5, 2015 the TNM Smart Challenge provided students, pupils and their communities a platform to showcase innovation in mobile application. TNM engaged MHub, Facebook, Google, Opera Software and IBM as technology partners for this initiative.