MTN and NTBC Launch New ClimateTech Accelerator for Young African Innovators

Looking for real runway to take a climate-smart idea from notebook to national impact? According to ITWeb Africa, MTN Zambia and the National Technology Business Centre just opened another door for young green innovators — and the structure of this partnership tells you exactly where the ClimateTech talent pipeline is heading next.

What Pachipanda actually is

Pachipanda started in Zambia in 2022 as a joint venture between MTN Zambia and World Wide Fund Zambia. By 2024 it had gone continental, and the 2025 Africa-wide finals took place at MTN Group headquarters in Johannesburg. Now in its fifth edition, this year's challenge — themed "Nature Meets Innovation: Unlocking Zambia's Green Economy" — was launched in Lusaka with government and conservation agencies in the room alongside MTN and the NTBC.

The framing matters here. Brilliant Habeenzu, permanent secretary in Zambia's Ministry of Technology and Science, positioned the theme as closely tied to the country's push to produce more, produce better and produce smarter, and pointed to national targets including higher crop production, 10,000MW of power generation, and growth in livestock and tourism. Read that carefully: this isn't a side project for a telco's CSR team. It's being wired into actual national productivity goals, with the ministry openly inviting initiatives like this one to the table.

What MTN is signaling to founders

Pamela Pio, general manager for corporate services at MTN Zambia, described MTN's role as extending well beyond connectivity and digital services — toward platforms where young people can develop, test, commercialise and scale their ideas. The 2026 edition is explicitly designed to widen access to training, mentorship and market access, with the stated ambition of turning climate-smart ideas into scalable businesses that create jobs.

For us in the ClimateTech founder lane, this is the part worth pausing on. A telecom running a five-year-old youth innovation challenge — backed by a conservation NGO, a government ministry, and a national technology business centre — is exactly the kind of multi-stakeholder alignment that grant committees and early-stage investors watch for when they decide whether a sector is real or performative. The signal here is that Zambia is building an institutional home for green innovation, not a one-off hackathon.

Where to aim your energy this week

If Pachipanda — or a programme shaped like it — is on your radar, here's the alignment check I'd run before you apply: does your idea map cleanly to a named national priority (energy, agriculture, water, jobs)? Can you articulate your customer in one sentence, and is that customer someone MTN's distribution network already reaches? And do you have a mentor or a programme partner you can name out loud, or are you still a solo founder carrying a slide deck?

You don't need all three answered to apply. You do need to know which one is your weakest, because that's exactly the conversation a selection panel will steer you toward anyway. Pick that one today, draft the answer, and let the rest of your application breathe. It's the highest-leverage twenty minutes you'll spend before any deadline window closes.