Upcountry insight: When technology goes rural…

NORTHERN PROVINCE MUSANZE — The Centre for Innovations and Technology Transfer (CITT) has extended its services to rural areas as a way of transforming the traditional mode of work and alleviate poverty through the use of available technological tools. The inovations by CITT, especially the use of fuel efficient community cooking stoves which has helped to address the problem of acute shortage of fuel energy for cooking in establishments like schools. The establishments of waste-water management and production of biogas that have been carried out in schools, households and prisons help to save fuel-wood consumption hence minimising deforestation . According to Didier Munezero a Manager at the centre, CITT serves as a model organisation for effective transfer of appropriate technologies to reduce poverty in the rural community. He says that the main mission of the ‘model centre’ is to develop appropriate technological innovations and enhance capacity of the private sector to multiply the technologies and ensure their sustainable adaptation.He calls upon the local authorities to cooperate in disseminating the information and supporting the services offered by the centre for innovation and technological transfer (CITT) which has branches in all provinces and Kigali City. The already developed fuel saving cooking stoves, like Rondereza, maize pilling machines, threshing machines have been exemplary in the effective use, in saving time and proper usage. Murekezi Abel, 25 one of the recruited workers with CITT, has managed to come up with an electric power reservoir using the experience he acquired through working with centre for innovation and technology transfer. Mukasine Josepha, 52, says that the available technology is good but costly, “where as these machines are important to us, many of us can not afford them, they are expensive”. Such technologies would contribute to the social economic welfare of the community through facilitating the development and transfer of appropriate technologies in a financially sustainable manner; however, many people have not understood the value of this innovation.Ends