evidoria

← Back to browse

Good practice Imported

mHub & the UNDP Growth Accelerator Challenge — Financing Malawi's Youth and Women-Led Enterprises

Malawi · Lilongwe · See the Malawi profile · See the Lilongwe profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 29% 76/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Malawi's first tech hub, mHub, delivers the UNDP-backed Growth Accelerator Challenge: six funding rounds since 2018 have co-financed 62 enterprises with over $1.5m and created 521 jobs, 36% held by women, reaching more than 10,000 people across value chains.

30,000+
Young Malawians trained since founding
62
Enterprises co-financed (Rounds 1-5, 2018-2022)
$1.5m+
Co-financing deployed (Rounds 1-5)
521
Jobs created (Rounds 1-5)
188 (36%)
Jobs held by women (Rounds 1-5)
10,000+
People reached across value chains
$40,000
Maximum co-financing per enterprise
mHub & the UNDP Growth Accelerator Challenge — Financing Malawi's Youth and Women-Led Enterprises

Details

Maturity
Scaling
Promoter
mHub, in partnership with UNDP Malawi, GrowthAfrica, the Royal Norwegian Embassy and KfW
Period
2018-2022 (Rounds 1-6, ongoing)
Keywords
entrepreneurship, technology, agribusiness, youth employment, women's economic empowerment

Context

mHub was founded in 2013 in Lilongwe by Rachel Sibande as Malawi's first technology and innovation hub, and has since trained more than 30,000 young Malawians in coding, robotics, data science and entrepreneurship.

Objectives

Since July 2018, mHub has delivered the Growth Accelerator Challenge together with UNDP Malawi and the Royal Norwegian Embassy, later joined by the German development bank KfW and GrowthAfrica, aiming to grow post-revenue enterprises in technology, agriculture, architecture and construction through structured business-development support.

Activities

Nine-month cohorts combine structured business-development training, mentorship and co-financing of up to $40,000 per enterprise. By the launch of Round 6 in September 2022, five rounds had been completed.

Results

The five completed rounds supported 62 entrepreneurs with more than $1.5 million in co-financing, creating 521 jobs — 188 of them (36%) held by women — and reaching over 10,000 people across the supported enterprises' value chains.

Conclusions

These figures are self-reported programme outputs published by UNDP Malawi rather than an independent econometric evaluation, so the extent to which job creation is directly attributable to the programme, rather than to the entrepreneurs' own growth, has not been separately established.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Medium (€50k–€500k)
Time to results
Medium (1–3 years)
Staffing & skills
mHub programme and training staff, UNDP Malawi programme management, business mentors and trainers, co-funding partners (Royal Norwegian Embassy, KfW, GrowthAfrica)

Conditions for success

  • a structured nine-month cohort combining business-development training, mentorship and co-financing
  • targeting post-revenue enterprises able to absorb capital productively
  • a multi-donor funding base (UNDP, Norway, KfW, GrowthAfrica) spreading risk across four-plus years
  • explicit targeting of youth and women entrepreneurs

Commonly funded by

Philanthropic / foundation funding

Indicative funding routes for practices of this type — always check each programme's current calls and eligibility rules.

Do you run this practice? Claim it — verified implementers get a public contact pathway and can propose corrections.

Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Attachments

Similar practices you may find useful