The East African Diaspora Media Watch (EADM)

fShare

Tweet

In Summary: A London-based mobile satellite communications services provider, Inmarsat, has launched its Smart Cities Education Programmed, a range of initiatives designed to educate and empower the next generation of students and entrepreneurs in Africa.  As a CIO staff writer in Kigali reports, the programmer, launched initially in Rwanda, will be replicated in other countries in the continent to purposely accelerate the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) and smart city solutions, providing the foundations for a more sustainable future.

Kigali, Rwanda—A London-based mobile satellite communications services provider, Inmarsat, has launched its Smart Cities Education Program, a range of initiatives designed to educate and empower the next generation of students and entrepreneurs in Africa.  The program, launched initially in Rwanda, will be replicated in other countries in the continent to purposely accelerate the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) and smart city solutions, providing the foundations for a more sustainable future.

The program will include a three-month student internship, an IoT boot camp for students and entrepreneurs, and a partnership with the winner of Rwanda’s 2016 MS Geek competition. In addition to providing knowledge, mentoring and coaching, Inmarsat and Activity have deployed LoRaWAN infrastructure around the city of Kigali for an initial period of a year, which will provide an IoT network for students to explore ideas and enable them to deploy their innovative ideas in a real-life environment.

Inmarsat is mentoring Rosine Mwiseneza, the winner of MS Geek 2016 – an annual competition designed to inspire female university students to employ technology to overcome issues faced by Rwandans. Specifically, Inmarsat is collaborating with Rosine and her team to implement a prototype IoT-based agricultural irrigation solution for potential commercialization. The goal is to create a scalable solution that can be used across Rwanda as well as Africa and the rest of the world, thanks to Inmarsat’s global networks.

“These types of initiatives are about overcoming the challenges Rwanda faces by providing students and the next generation of entrepreneurs with the knowledge and tools they need to create a more sustainable future,” Paul Gudonis, President, Inmarsat Enterprise, said in a statement. He said that equipping students with the means to experiment with precision farming techniques has the potential to completely rewrite agriculture as Rwanda knows it. But beyond that, we want to expose students to the art of the possible and get them thinking about how IoT can drive innovation across all sectors, Mr. Paul Gudonis said. “I expect we’ll see students imagining new and novel IoT solutions, many of which we may not have even considered yet,” Mr. Paul Gudonis said.

Inmarsat is also offering a three-month internship to one student from the Carnegie-Mellon University’s campus in Kigali. The selected student will learn about the importance of satellite communications in the IoT ecosystem and will work with the Ministry of Youth and ICT to initiate some early IoT deployments. The intern will be responsible for managing the network, the application layer and the sensors involved in these deployments. Additionally, Inmarsat will host an IoT developer boot camp, along with FabLab, IoT networking partner Actility and ICT Chamber. The boot camp will take entrepreneurs, developers and students through a complete IoT journey, which will demonstrate how to build sensors, how to collect and analyses the data, the applications involved and how to build them, along with an exploration of different agricultural and environmental use cases.

Source: CIO East Africa - Business Technology Leadership

http://cio.co.ke/news/top-stories/inmarsat-initiatives-to-enable-rwanda-students-harness-iot

fShare

Tweet