Chakwera dares graduates

President Lazarus Chakwera has dared university graduates to innovate and move to create jobs through entrepreneurship instead of turning into jobseekers.

Presiding over the first congregation of the Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences (Mubas), he also called on students who benefitted from loan schemes for their tuition and upkeep to start repaying immediately they start earning an income.

Chakwera encouraged the fresh graduates to look to the future with excitement and eagerness, saying they should utilise technologies at their disposal and use the same to overcome challenges.

“My dream is that you will marry the innovations you are going to create using the skills you have gained here with a spirit of entrepreneurship in order to turn your innovations into wealth creation engines that create jobs for other Malawians,” he said.

On student loans, the President said his administration has delivered on its promise by increasing university upkeep loans from K350 000 to K560 000 per student per year and urged the beneficiaries to play their part by paying back.

He said: “In so doing [repaying], you will enable us to sustain the provision of this support to innovators who are still studying in our universities and those who are yet to come to our universities.”

Students at Mubas and other universities receive loans for upkeep and tuition and the Higher Education Students’ Loans and Grants Board is on record to have said that it is owed over K5 billion in unpaid loans.

In the 2024/25 academic year, the board plans to support not less than 29 000 students with loans.

During the ceremony yesterday, 114 students, including 30 females and 84 males, graduated.

Chakwera, who was also installed as Chancellor of Mubas, said the graduation is historic because it is the first for Mubas and marked a shift from educating the youth to occupy a desk in an office to enabling youth to build businesses and industries.

“Today we leave behind a past that focused on giving students technical expertise to use tools invented by other nations and we press on towards a future that focuses on giving students the skills to make their own inventions,” he said.

In her remarks, Mubas Vice-Chancellor Associate Professor Nancy Chitera said they are convinced that its graduates have undergone a transformational process at the institution and that they are equipped with industry ready skills.

She said that the university seeks to contribute to the fulfilment of Malawi 2063 through its three pillars of agriculture commercialisation and productity, industrialisation and urbanisation.

Chitera further said the university has initiated an agricultural mechanisation unit and has collaborated with the Ministry of Trade and Industry to establish an industrial park at Mubas campus in Blantyre.

“We will be producing different food products such as cassava starch and mango puree and we will be training small and medium enterprises in terms of production and maintenance of the equipment,” she said.

The Vice-Chancellor also  said Mubas plans to open fully-developed campuses in Salima, Lilongwe and Mzuzu to expand access to higher education.

Formerly The Polytechnic under the University of Malawi (Unima), Mubas was established by an Act of Parliament in 2019 following the unbundling of Unima and started operations in 2021.

It has a student population of about 10 000 and offers 115 programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

The university seeks to increase enrolment to 30 000 students by 2030, according to its strategic plan.

Besides Mubas, the Unima unbundling also created Kamuzu University of Health Sciences that merged former Unima constituent colleges, College of Medicine and Kamuzu College of Nursing while Chancellor College in Zomba retained the Unima tag.