{UAH} "INNOVATORS" WHO USE SOMEONE ELSE'S PRODUCT/IDEA

Picture: Makerere University, Ugand (the Ivory tower) an institution that has come up with internationally appreciated innovation lately.

As those close to me know fully well, I encourage young Africans, particularly those in technical colleges and universities where idea's and tools are sometimes available, to engage in innovation. In fact any effort towards building simple technologies that help communities could mean a lot and even turn into a highly profitable business or industry. Even if it isn't necessarily a new innovation. I am saying this while being mindful of principals like copyright laws and intellectual property rights.

Makerere University can be proud of having built/assembled a working electric vehicle, but surely they cannot claim it as their innovation. Electric cars were first built more than a century ago before the discovery of oil.

It's just that everyone is free to copy the technology since the patent rights expired decades ago. So now we are simply (finally) assembling the already existing technology ourselves with parts and components imported from abroad, right?

The same university already built a working plane back in the 1970's. I wonder where it is. By now Uganda should have had an assembly plant for light planes had it not been for Julius.

Yes, Nyerere and the 1979 war. 

Maybe by now we wouldn't be buying planes from Canada and the EU but building/assembling our own for the African remote travel market.

Currently as I try to encourage young Africans to try to develop innovation that helps solve our problems particularly in rural Africa, I noticed that there are important clean energy products already on the market in rich developed countries, but they are used for luxury activities like holiday camping or excursions in wild nature environments. Yet the same simple products could be so much more meaningful in uplifting poor peoples standard of living in rural Africa and other poor communities in Asia. If only we could study such example products, and make them simple, affordable and durable. Particularly in area's like water supply & purification, household electricity generation and storage, alternative lighting appliances, mosquito repellant devices to fight malaris, cooking technologies that help prevent cutting trees for example.

Meanwhile, the local press is awash with news about precious money being wasted, literally thrown down endless pits like ghost SACCO associations/non-existent women or youth groups and poorly planned industrial projects when there are many commercially profitable solutions that simply need a little local ingenuity and a few materials put together, and we can thereby solve some of the countless pressing development needs in our corner of the planet. What we need is rudimentary innovation/research philosophy attached to our higher education system.

And one thing we need to learn early in such environments is that where there is a problem in society, there is a business opportunity for those who can solve that problem.

However we have to avoid the practice where one steals someone else's idea or product and then presents it to the world as their own.

In some sections of our corrupt society, they call this "being smart". How?

It is just theft by empty heads.

The result is that there could be countless ingenious individuals with great plans and worthy idea's that could really help transform society, but people will think twice about discussing any ingenious projects lest they are stolen, thereby leaving them to never materialize.

Others will utilise peoples idea's for their own ulterior short term financial or political benefits and leave the actual project in stagnation.

I am told that this is exactly what has been happening with the Ushs 20bn annual funding for the Kiira Electric vehicle project where for the last seven years since it was first developed, there is nothing more to show for the funds except the one vehicle assembled years ago, and which is still being driven around the country today for proud public display.

The few photo's of their workshop is no different from a garage in downtown Kisenyi slums, yet for all these years we have been told about mass production of the vehicle. Only a few weeks ago did I finally see an architectural design of a vehicle assembly plant for the project. God knows if and when it will move from paper and speeches to reality, and will they be held accountable for monies lost to date?

But then do we realize how much time we have wasted and stagnated ourselves because of theft and the so-called "smartness" behaviour? Or should we now call it what it really is: Greed stupidity.

Meanwhile, in regards to having unique innovation idea,'s, a few weeks ago I wanted to congratulate some students from our own Makerere University for winning at the Big Idea innovation awards at University of California in the US.

But as I read the story, I suddenly remembered reading about another Ugandan, Mr. Denis Lee Oguzu, a young Member of Parliament, who had claimed to have invented what sounded as the exact same innovation as the Makerere students: An ambulance app for smartphones.

Back in March this year, it was published that Hon Oguzu had invented "a mobile, on-demand, hyper-local ambulance, police and fire service call and dispatch emergency system for Android and iOS phones. He said "it aggregates various types of private and public emergency services and allows the nearest required service to be dispatched immediately to the patient at the fastest possible time". A great idea that might sell well internationally.

Mr. Onguzu who was also an Information Technology graduate from the same Makerere University, even presented this ambulance app innovation just last month at the World Health Organization innovation Challenge in Cap Verde, West Africa, where the country's president was on site for the ribbon cutting ceremony and toured all the 30 different WHO innovation challenge finalist products on display. While the young Ugandan legislator called his app the National Ambulance Service' (NAS), the Makerere University students who went to California had a product that was eerily similar but which they had dubbed 'the Cloud-based Emergency Response System' (CERS).

In their brochure explanation, they say it is "a USSD-based mobile application that enables real-time matching of ambulances to patients." And to crown it all, they claim it is "a brainchild of Moses Kintu (team leader), Joy Martha Bawaya, Jordan Ongwech, Nelson Mandela and Trevor Nagaba, all students of Uganda's biggest University, Makerere" they said.

Suddenly one question started relaxing across my mind: 'Who is stealing from who?"

Just yesterday, I learned that Makerere University itself had won a $1.25 million dollar grant from Google to develop another innovation they recently released called AirQo. "An air quality monitoring project which applies Artificial Intelligence (AI) to data from low-cost air sensors installed on moto-taxis to track and forecast air pollution."

But I am now holding back from any congratulations to Makerere until further notice, lest we are all being fooled by some emptiheads at the Ivory tower.

Written by Hussein Lumumba Amin

Date: 30/05/2019

Kampala, Uganda

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Here are the two recent stories about the different "innovators" of Makerere's Ambulance app:

- Makerere students at the Big Idea contest: campusbee.ug/news/makerere-students-beat-california-learners-to-win-big-idea-contest/

- Honourable Denis Lee Oguzu at the WHO innovation Challenge: afro.who.int/news/ugandans-among-top-contenders-who-innovation-challenge-award

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