Meltwater Foundation of the Norwegian IT company, Meltwater Group has come half way into a 10-year project that seeks to establish at least one world class software development company in Ghana to develop commercial software that could compete with those at Silicon Valley. The company has, over the past five years, been investing $2million every year to train, mentor and support selected young Ghanaian university graduates who have interest in starting their own software development companies. “But the ultimate goal is that by the end of the 10-year period we should have at least one world class software development company in Ghana creating globally commercial software and exporting from Africa to the global market,” said Managing Director of Meltwater Foundation, Fredrik Reff Sydnes. Training goes on at the Meltwater Entrepreneurship School of Technology (MEST), which gives two years full-time and 100% scholarship academic and practical training to university graduates with varied academic backgrounds, ranging from physical to social sciences. But the selected students must show interesting is wanting to establish their own software development companies and have a demonstrated desire and drive to create their own space and make difference in the global rather than local environment. MEST also mentors the students, and also runs an incubator for graduates with potential income-generating business ideas, providing them with seed capital of between $30,000 and $100,000 to set up businesses in which Melterwater Foundation keeps a minority equity stake. Over the past five years, MEST has trained some 100 graduates, about half of whom are working in the 11 startups in the MEST incubator, with two, Nandi Mobile and Leti Kings reportedly positive on cash flow. The fifth batch of 27 students has just been admitted last month after being selected from 600 applications, which went through a rigorous selection process.