The Malawi Research and Education Network (MAREN) says it will continue to contribute towards Malawi’s development by closing the digital divide among Malawian students in higher learning institutions and researchers across the globe.
Chief Executive Officer for MAREN, Solomon Dindi, said this on Friday in Zomba during a media engagement aimed at highlighting the organisation’s work, products and projects in the education sector.
According to Dindi, students and researchers are able to access academic work from anywhere because MAREN has built a network that interconnects institutions as well as digital services that comprise various educational materials.
“Under the Digital Malawi project, over 43 institutions and over 83,000 students have been connected nationwide,” explained Dindi.
He said the services are easy to use and they are charged at cost recovery for MAREN to run its services, but students and researchers are able to access some services for free.
“For example we have Education Roaming, Eduroam in short, which is available in various university campuses and is fast for internet connectivity and makes it easy for e-learning,” added Dindi.
He also assured those already on the network and prospective users that MAREN has done its best to make sure that they are safe from cyberattacks hence having engineers who monitor activities on the network.
In her remarks, Finance and Administration Manager at MAREN, Grace Dzoole, stressed that MAREN’s core duty is to ensure that students and researchers are learning and finding resources on the internet taking into consideration that most of the things are now being done digitally.
In terms of expansion, Dzoole added that there is room for growth and MAREN intends to reach out to as many institutions as possible so that students can benefit from the education network.
“Our goal is to reach out to more institutions and have them connected because this is a network that is specialised for them beyond internet connectivity,” added Dzoole.
Apart from providing internet services for education and research institutions, MAREN also helps other institutions to connect to the Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPV6) platform, a modern internet numbering system and is also in a number of partnerships with manufacturers such as Huawei to supply hardware related to modern technology.
