The programme aims to address the gap in openly accessible biodiversity data and the use of relevant technologies to ensure its use in policy and decision-making. The programme complements other efforts in Malawi by including biodiversity data mobilisation as part of its student coursework and research activities. The program aims to produce scientists who will provide leadership and technological skills in institutions for applying biodiversity informatics research for the species preservation and sustainable development. Malawi has a number of efforts to document the country’s biological diversity. These can be found in academic research reports, museum, herbarium, EIA reports and many others. The majority of this data remains inaccessible to users, in gray reports or biocollections. As a result, few biodiversity-related policies are informed by these data. There are also limited efforts to analyze long-term data to understand trends and impacts of different policies and management strategies. This has contributed to unnecessary financial expenditure resulting from duplicative data collection in the same area by different persons/teams or institutions simply because they do not know that recent data in their subject area already exist. This programme is intended to bring sanity to data mobilization among various stakeholders by ensuring that biodiversity data are collected, shared and that expensive-duplicative data collection episodes are minimised. The programme is offered through an exciting taught courses in the first year while students prepare for research which proceeds in the  second year. Course work in the programme include Biodiversity Context, Principles of Informatics, Ecosystems Ecology, Computer Programming, Biodiversity Data Capture, Statistical Analysis and Ecological Modelling, Research Methods, Seminar I, Geospatial Databases and Analysis, Data Science for Biodiversity, Biodiversity Data Use, Climate Change and Biodiversity, Science Communication and Policy, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and a dissertation as a research output. The students are also mandated to publish their data so that data become visible and accessible for use in defining policy directions in biodiversity conservation and management.

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