2026 Consumer Choice Awards

I am delighted to have been nominated again at the Consumer Choice Awards Malawi 2026, this time in the category of the Most Inspiring Female Business Leader as founder and CEO of Q2 Systems. Last year, I was nominated as the Most Inspiring Female Corporate Leader, and we took it home. It was wonderful for the work of my non-profit, Ntha Foundation, to be recognized in that way.

https://www.instagram.com/nthandamanduwi/p/DR97fusEarc/

Q2 is my newest and most ambitious bet yet – a company I established at the beginning of 2025, as I pursued my MBA studies at the Michigan State University.

VOTE FOR NTHANDA VIA THE CCA WEBSITE

About Q2 Systems

At Q2 Systems, we are building closed-loop autonomous infrastructure systems—integrating simulation, real-world deployment, and continuous learning into one adaptive ecosystem.

In simpler terms:
We design systems that learn from the world, act in the world, and improve over time.

From autonomous mobility through QTrax, to intelligent production systems like the Kwathu Smart Innovation Farms, our goal is to rethink how infrastructure is built—especially in environments where traditional systems have failed or never existed.

I deeply believe in a future of infrastructure which is not be retroffitted too late, but rather designed as autonomy-native from the start.

VIEW THE Q2 DEMO

Successes Thus Far

This work has already begun to open doors—globally.

I was selected as a Detroit Tech Fellow, joining a new generation of founders building the future of industry and innovation in one of America’s most historically significant cities. Detroit to me is a statement about rebuilding, reinvention, and systems thinking.

I was also selected for the inaugural Big Bets Fellowship: Africa Fellowship, part of a global network focused on tackling large-scale challenges with bold, scalable ideas. I trust that this experience will sharpen how I think about markets, infrastructure, and what it actually takes to build solutions that endure.

These platforms allow us to test, build, and scale what Q2 Systems represents.

Beyond Me

This nomination is not just about me.

It is about:

A different vision for global innovation that benefits Africa
A belief that we can build globally relevant systems from our contexts
A commitment to designing infrastructure that actually works for the environments it serves

I invite you to participate in that vision.

VOTE FOR NTHANDA MANDUWI VIA THE CCA WEBSITE

Listen to the Lessons Conversation

Lessons Conversation

Delve into Business and International Development with Nthanda Manduwi

podcast.lessonsconversation.com

I am reading John Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics.

The book is giving me a historical bridge between economic theory and the world that produced it. It has somehow succeeded at taking me back to being a student of economics, and connecting theory, yet again, to practise.

The historical narrative primarily begins around 1770, marking the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. It moves through merchant capitalism, colonial companies, slavery, wage labour, factories, industrialization, crises, technology, empire, dependency theory, globalization, and all the way to present day artificial intelligence.

Perhaps my favorite part [biases considered]: the book includes women like Anna Wheeler, Flora Tristan, Rosa Luxemburg, Joan Robinson, and Silvia Federici. Cassidy specifically discusses female factory workers and Federici’s argument that unpaid domestic labour is essential to reproducing the capitalist workforce.

African economies inherited systems shaped by extraction, fragmented production, weak industrial bases, imported curricula, interrupted political continuity, and young populations trying to enter a global economy already shaped by others.

These conditions in present day still influence how African countries produce, trade, educate, govern, and imagine development.

Rethinking economics in Africa therefore requires more than just policy adjustment. It requires a deeper rethinking of how Africans are taught to understand value, production, labour, history, power, institutions, and the global order. The classroom, the farm, the factory, the port, the household, the ministry, the market, and the university all belong in the same conversation.

Economics is often introduced as the study of scarcity and choice. That definition has its place, but it narrows the field too quickly.

Economics is the system through which societies organize value: who owns resources, who works, who is paid, what is produced, what is imported, what is exported, who captures profit, what the state protects, what households reproduce, and how a country sits inside the global order.

Seen this way, economics becomes foundational knowledge. Every university student should encounter it, whether they are studying engineering, tourism, education, public health, agriculture, technology, arts, law, public administration, or business.

Every profession operates inside economic systems. Every sector creates, captures, distributes, or loses value. A university education should prepare students to understand those systems with historical, institutional, and practical clarity.

Africa needs people who can model policy and understand dignity. People who can read balance sheets and still care about the village. People who can build industries without reproducing extraction. People who can govern systems without forgetting humans.

That, to me, is the real work.

Listen to the full podcast, or read the full article via my blog byntha.com

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