Cape Town - In a R15 million partnership, UCT has teamed up with MTN to boost sustainable innovation in Africa.
Telecommunications company MTN will invest R15m in the MTN Solution Space, an innovation hub at the UCT Graduate School of Business (GSB), over the next three years.
“Each partner has complementary expertise and skills, so together their impact on African innovation will be greater and the solutions emerging as a result of their collaboration will reach further,” said UCT GSB director Professor Walter Baets.
The collaboration will combine the action-learning and research strengths of the UCT GSB with MTN’s technology and resources to create, among others, mobile apps and programmes for educational, medical and economic empowerment. It also seeks to promote entrepreneurship and small business growth.
MTN Group corporate affairs officer Paul Norman said: “MTN is committed to leading the delivery of a bold new digital world, a world where technological development and mobile integration allow for new possibilities, not just for our own customers, but for people and communities across Africa.
“We foresee Africa’s brightest and most innovative minds collaborating to find new solutions that grow from test environments into new markets. We look forward to elevating the profile of cutting- edge African innovators and entrepreneurs.”
MTN Solution Space has supported start-up projects such as that of former student Francois Petousis, who founded the Lumkani project, a proactive, early-warning fire detection system designed for shack dwellers.
The detector itself, named Khusela, is a low-cost fire detector and alert system specifically designed to address fire risks. It emerged from Petousis’ thesis project at UCT in 2013, with help from UCT lecturer Samuel Ginsberg, electrical engineer Paul Mesarcik, economist David Gluckman, industrial designer Max Basler and Emily Vining, who has experience as a community engagement expert. The detector won the People’s Choice Award at the 2014 Global Social Venture Competition and scooped second place in two separate categories at the South African Innovation Summit.
MTN Solution Space manager Sarah-Anne Arnold said MTN had an extensive footprint in Africa and the GSB a strong representation of African students, combined with a reputation for research and academic excellence.
“So we are combining our strengths for a common purpose – finding solutions to the biggest challenges facing our continent,” she said.
Arnold added that the partnership represented a truly symbiotic and purposeful venture into the future.
Baets said the UCT GSB was dedicated to developing a new paradigm for learning and research, with an emphasis on building African solutions and innovations.
“In collaboration with MTN we will be able to create better outcomes.
Our combined networks create a collaborative innovation landscape like no other,” Baets said.
“It is an investment in solutions for Africa, by Africa, in Africa.”
Cape Times