ESCOM AWARDS 19 FEMALE ENGINEERING STUDENTS AT MUBAS AND MUST

In its commitment to promote girl child education and help the country to have well educated and influential women in different government departments and the private sector, Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi (ESCOM) awarded scholarships to best performing female engineering students for the Malawi University of Business and Appliances (MUBAS) and Malawi University of Science and Technology (MUST).

Speaking at the presentation on Thursday 7 July, 2022 at ESCOM Mpemba Training Centre, MUBAS Vice-Chancellor, Associate Professor Nancy Chitera thanked ESCOM for the gesture shown to the students, saying the assistance will go a long way in bridging the existing gap of female and male engineers in the country.

Chitera added that since the introduction of the scholarship program in 2017, there has been a tremendous increase in number of female engineering students - adevelopment which she described as a great progress to help female engineering students to work hard in their studies.

I must admit here that, we have a lot of capable female students in the country, who can make it as great engineers, but majority of them lack support from the corporate world. We just thank ESCOM for coming up with this initiative because they are helping to build a better Malawi as they say educating a girl child is like educating the nation, she said.

ESCOMs Social and Gender Inclusion Manager, Eluby Chiyenda said the program, which was started in 2017, covers tuition fees mainly targeting female students to increase the number of qualified female engineers in the market so that when the Corporation wants to recruit, it should find suitably qualified ladies on the labour market.

Chiyenda said: What we used to face in the past is that we could not get the numbers that we were looking for. So, we moved into a strategy to help in bringing up female engineers by awarding scholarships to best female engineering students”.

sourced: Nyasatimes