It has come to our realization that Engineering students alone can not propel this country to the aspired height of innovation, says Dr Kamau Gachigi, the chairman and coordinator of Science and Technology Park Steering Committee, University of Nairobi, thus we are scouting for creative and innovative minds from across the country to blend with engineering students – to catalyse them – to transform their knowledge into diverse projects.
It is with this background that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),USA, idea of Fabrication Laboratory (fablab) come into being. As of now fablab is an international network, that is being domesticated by the University of Nairobi, School of Engineering, to realise a science and technology park. The park will ignite young people innovativeness and creativity in an exciting way, Gachigi explains.
Another MIT fablab is operating in Majiwa at Bondo district, run by ARO Fablab, an NGO, sponsored by Norad Norway.
At MIT, the brain child of fablab; with a mission to muster a combination of passion and inventiveness, on how students can make (almost) anything notwithstanding their course of study. "A sculpture student with no background in engineering made a portable personal space for screaming that saves them, replaying later. Another made a web browser that lets parrots navigate the Net," says Prof Neil Gershenfield, an MIT physicist and a computer scientist, who is among chief proponents of fablab.
Apart from lectures on how to make (almost) anything - that will be shared, transmitted via satellite across the 35 countries around the world – where Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa are the first beneficiaries in Africa. “The students will access unique equipments which are appropriate and very expensive,” says Gachigi.
The Ministry of Higher Education will be providing other necessary materials and facilities as need and time will command. Aspiring innovators will also benefit from the national public-private endowment fund to facilitate research in science, technology, and innovation. Yes, Kenya National Council of Science and Technology is out to help upcoming scientist to improve on their innovations as well market to the private sector.
“For innovative ideas to be translated to end products, financial back up is essential,” says Prof Shem Wandiga, the director for the Centre for Science and Technology Innovation, Kenya, “the Ministry of Higher Education is toying with the idea of scouting innate-innovative-talents across the country to nurture them into maturity.”
Wandiga says that Kenya has had innovators who drown into the tides of time from lack of motivation, institutional and financial support, their works not patented, and poverty that compels them to seek jobs in companies that exploit them with a peanut pay.
Students need to be given access and means to solve their contextual problems, inventively, says Gershenfield, this touches something very, very deep - somehow it goes back to nest-building or mastering their own environment.
There is sort of this deep thing inside that most people don't express that comes tumbling out when they get access to MIT fablab tools," he says.
Students need to realise that their divergent disciplines of study should not be an hindrance to invention, says Arsenio Poblete, a mathematics lecture at the University of Eastern Africa, Baraton, (UEAB), who dubs up as a design artist, innovation is an inner will to create something that can be an answer to a prevailing problem or coming up with means of improving on existing device.
The don says that innovation is not contained in building far reaching projects/devices but “simple” devices that can be of help in a given people. “Thus,” Poblete says, “inventors are those minds capable of harmonising a wide range of principles, from vast disciplines; languages, arts, social sciences, mathematics, pure sciences, engineering and technology.” For Joshua Adegun, a technology don at UEAB says that the greatest tragedy that befalls life of students as they advance with their academic pursuit is the fading away of childhood curiosity – the drive to ask, observe, try, and make things with available materials.
Simon Mwaura, who hit the media, in July, by his mobile phone use innovations; security control, that opens and closing the door; switching on and off the lights of his home; and making tea, pouring it into a thermos flask and corking – from wherever he is. And Dominic Wanjihia, an innovator of Evapocooler – have joined the MIT fablab, University of Nairobi, to dive deep into the vast sea of innovation, yes induce their innovative sparks to their colleagues.
“Wherever I am faced with a problem,” says Mwaura, as he is busy with other engineering students of various academic years working on various projects at the fablab, “I'm always triggered to think of the appropriate solution.”
Prof Kaburu M'rubu, the VC of Gretsa University, Thika, laments that for long we have been depending on other people innovations which have reduced us to mitumba (second – hand) technology adaptors, adding: “Innovation can however make us technology donors. And though technology requires resources, it actually begins in the mind.”
The science and technology park at the University of Nairobi will design an infrastructure for research ideas, says Gachigi, that will be conceptualized, experimented, build to end products in the school of engineering laboratory, and market the devices. “The rapid prototyping facility will be used as an innovation centre for university students, lecturers and the general public.”
“We are going to be a centre of incubation,” says the mechanical engineering lecture, “we already have seven operational companies,Tekno International and BWANA Industries, among them, springing out of innovativeness to meet the people's needs while creating job opportunities.”
However, African schools have a problem in focusing so heavily on theory, says Dr Ave Kludze, a Ghana scientist at National Astronautical Science Agency (NASA), whereas they are expected to focus heavily on practicals – solving real problems at the university.
“If we can bring that practical element into African schools,” says Kludze, who was a system engineer in developing Calipso Satellite that was launched in 2006, “we have a lot of brilliant young minds who will benefit.”
The University of Nairobi, MIT fablab, engineering students, have formed a high school outreach program with a mission of popularising engineering, encouraging secondary school students to pursue the discipline as a dawn, a light at the end of Kenya's vision to be industrialised by 2030.
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