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AirQo Project team receives US$1.3m grant

Google has announced Makerere University’s AirQo Prototype among the best 20 Artificial Intelligence projects that will share $25 million in grants from Google.org. AirQo is an air monitoring project that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and low-cost technologies to generate and quantify data on air pollution in the designated areas in Uganda.

“The data collected is used to inform public policies on reducing, containing and better management of air pollution and its associated health risks. The same data is also used to raise awareness on air quality issues,” said Assoc. Prof. Engineer Bainomugisha the Project Leader during a press conference held on Wednesday, 8th May 2019. Assoc. Prof. Bainomugisha is also the Chair, Department of Computer Science, College of Computing and Information Sciences (CoCIS), Makerere University.

The AirQo Project is run by a team comprising students and staff from the Department of Computer Science, School of Computing and Information Technology, CoCIS. The project was successfully developed in 2016 with the aim of contributing to the improvement of urban ambient air quality. It tested and validated a robust, low-cost air monitoring device and algorithm.

With limited funding and support, the project was implemented in places within Kampala and other urban places of Mbale, Manafwa, Bundibugyo and Bududa. According to Dr. Bainomugisha, the required data on air quality within the aforementioned areas is collected through the integration of the AirQo device with a Mobile application.

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New e-Governance Online Short Course coming to CoCIS

E-governance is beyond the scope of e-government. While e-governance is defined as the mere delivery of government services and information to the citizen using electronic means, e-governance allows direct participation of all constituents in public and private spheres. It has potential to change how citizens relate to government as much as it changes how citizens relate to each other.

E-governance allows citizens to communicate with government, participate in the governments' policy-making and decision-making processes. It also enables civil society discourse and service delivery.E-governance initiatives in Uganda face high failure rate due to such factors as lack of ICT skills in the public sector, inadequate human resource training and inadequate infrastructure. Other challenges range from inadequate governance skills right through to lack of ICT project management and ICT change management competencies. Although the Uganda Government and non-government organizations alike are grappling with these governance issues, there is no course in place to address these challenges. This calls for accelerated development of curricula to make Uganda, East Africa and Africa ready for e-governance.

To bridge the gap above, and to build long term national and regional capacity, a short course in e-governance under the TSEED project hasbeen developed after a series of workshops and seminars during the past two months (April - May 2019).

The Project team leader Assoc. Prof. Gilbert Maiga and his team collaborated with Dr. Paul Muinda the Deputy Principal, College of Education and External Studies (CEES) and his team to make this a success. This course will address e-Governance issues faced by a wide range of participants that include policy makers, managers, systems administrators and employees in the services industry. It can be completed on campus or in a blended learning environment in which participants take courses on campus and online. The course will have 12 modules each for a duration of 2 weeks. The modules are;

• Introduction to e-governance,
• Legal and Policy Framework for e-governance,
• Emerging trends in e-governance,
• Development models for e-governance,
• Monitoring and evaluation of e-governance projects,
• Data science for e-governance,
• E-governance systems integration,
• Geo-spatial technologies for e-governance,
• e-governance strategy management,
• Change management for e-governance.
• Security in e-Governance Systems

It should be noted that the School of Computing and Informatics Technology (SCIT) has a big pool of staff who can competently teach the e-governance modules but also intends to find experts in e-Governance from industry to supplement the existing staff.