A few months ago, for the VLIRUOS ITP project, I was at Ardhi University together with my students. We collaborated with Ardhi’s students and professors to set up a LoRaWAN infrastructure on campus. During that period, we also provided capacity building on software engineering and sensor networks.
By the time we left, there was a fully working IoT laboratory up and running at Ardhi — a place where students could experiment, learn, and build.
In the months that followed, the Ardhi students continued developing the software dashboard. They improved the platform and managed to visualize real sensor data. Seeing them take ownership and push the project forward was incredibly rewarding.
Now being back at Ardhi University, I heard something that made everything come full circle: a company – Twiga cement Tanzania – has approached Ardhi to implement an IoT solution for fine dust, hazardous gasses monitoring.
And this is exactly the goal of this VLIRUOS ITP project.
The Innovation Hub we are working on aims to be a central point of knowledge — connecting industry, government, and academia. A place where challenges meet expertise, and where ideas can turn into prototypes and prototypes into real solutions.
Hearing that Ardhi now has the capacity, the knowledge, the equipment, and the confidence to develop prototypes — and even start creating actual products — truly feels like a dream coming true!
-Tom
