Rachel Sibande

Rachel Sibande is a Digital Development Specialist. Ms. Sibande established Malawi's first technology and innovation hub; mHub. The hub provides digital skills training, financing and investment readiness support for emerging innovative entrepreneurs. Rachel currently serves as Senior Director at the United Nations Foundation. She leads Big Data for development and Digital Transformation work in Africa. Rachel has over a decade of extensive experience managing development projects in more than 16 countries cutting across digital financial services, public health, agriculture, disaster management and elections monitoring. She became a Google Scholar in 2015, being a recipient of Google's Anita Borg Award for outstanding computer science students from around the world. Rachel has been listed twice by Forbes as one of Africa's 30 under 30 entrepreneurs in 2016 and as a new wealth creator in 2019. In 2018, Ms. Sibande won the Climate Smart Innovation pan African competition of the Next Einstein Forum after inventing a thermal chemical plant that produces light and gas from maize cobs for mini grids to power rural households in Malawi. Rachel completed a PhD in computer Science at Rhodes University in South Africa. She read Cyrptography and Coding Theory for her Masters degree from the Mzuzu University and holds a Bachelors of Science degree from the University of Malawi.