Innovation Programs
The office of the Chief Digital Officer has ambitions to transform the public infrastructure space into an innovative and citizen-centric one. Our innovation programs bring together the private sector, academia and development organizations to tackle challenges facing public infrastructure in Rwanda, by co-designing the solutions that are fit for the infrastructure context and consumer ecosystem. The initiatives listed here have been carefully curated based on the level of impact and complexity that requires collaborative solution design.
The national grid has gone through significant improvement from frequent outages weekly to just a few outages quarterly. We want to achieve zero outages throughout the year by 2024. To achieve this, we need to have 360o grid monitoring capabilities that would enable us to proactively fix detected issues and give us insights about the problem triggers, the context and when do they occur.
Electric global energy consumption grows by a factor of 2% every year and this is expected to be even more in developing economies. The more energy consumed, the more CO2 emission from burned fuel to produce electricity. We need to raise awareness and equip consumers with tools that encourage them to consume energy more responsibly and more efficiently, hence bringing down the individual cost of electric consumption.
Non-revenue water (NRW) is one of the biggest hindrances to achieving universal access to clean water in Rwanda, since around 40% of all the water produced gets lost in the distribution network through pipe bursts and leakages. The key contributing factors to these occurrences are excessive pressure in the network and aging network infrastructure. We have a target to achieve universal access to clean water by 2024 and one of the key enablers is to bring the NRW rate down to less than 5%, through network reconfiguration and technological innovations such as remote sensing, satellite technology and proactive monitoring and control.
A lot of efforts have been put forth to equip citizens with information on land zoning, master plans and guidance on how to obtain construction permits in Rwanda. Despite these efforts, some people will have a reason to bypass the regulations and rather develop informal settlements that do not meet the required urbanization standards. This creates a mushroom effect of slums around cities, which are not only disrupting the city’s sustainability plan, but also putting occupants at predictable risks. We are looking for innovative solutions that use satellite imagery to proactively detect and warn city managers of any informal settlement much earlier before full development, and provide advisory to the land owner.
As of today (August 2022), 80% of construction permit applications submitted to Rwanda Housing Authority (and district one stop centers) do not either meet minimum requirements, or are not following urbanization standards required for the applied permit, which results in rejection. In most cases, the applicant will resubmit the application after attempting to make the required correction, and only 30% of these will pass, and 70% gets rejected. It takes by average 5 resubmissions for an application to be successful. The resulting average lead time to obtain a construction permit is between 4 to 6 months. The law provides a response time of maximum 21 days (either for rejection or acceptance), and we want to make 21 days the maximum it takes to get a construction permit after application submission.
Rwanda aims to reduce the waiting time in Kigali from 30 minutes to 15 minutes during peak hours by 2024. To achieve this many initiatives have to be put in place including the development of new road networks. However, having many roads is not enough to inform the decision of drivers on which road to take to avoid the congestion. We strongly believe that having intelligent traffic routing mechanism would ease the congestion by evenly distributing the traffic flow across available roads.
Current expropriations processes are manual, prone to human error and take infinite amount of time to compensate citizens for expropriated properties. These delays contribute greatly to the implementation of the project itself which usually requires the expropriation activities to be complete first. Some of the contributing factors to the expropriation delays are but not limited to: property valuation that is not agreed upon between the owner and the valuer resulting in appeals, aggregation of total due amount, fund mobilization and payment followup to ensure every owner has been paid. We would like to automate the end to end (e2e) expropriation experience in such a way that what used to take months can now be reduced to less than a week.
The National Laboratory of Public Works is managed by Rwanda Trabsport Development Agency (RTDA) to offer laboratory services for public works. Currently, all operations and processes are manual (talking about 87 manual workflows), including interface with customers. We want to digitize the interaction journey between customers and the lab to ensure a seamless customer experience and sustainable record keeping for lab operations. Read more about the lab here.
Rapid urbanization not only causes complex land cover changes, but also affects vegetation coverage and the surrounding area, affecting the circulation of the urban hydrological and ecological systems and changing the urban environment. Satellite imagery provides broad, precise, reliable information for quantifying the city's scope, monitoring the process of urban expansion, and analyzing social-environmental impact of urbanization.
With the rapid urbanization rate, there is a surge in energy demand due to increased number of cars and human activities in cities. To ensure greener and sustainable cities, it is important to measure and pinpoint different CO2 concentration levels above city atmospheres, and to track progress towards net-zero by 2050. We need to be able to effectively detect and measure the concentration of greenhouse gases above city skies and equip energy policymakers with a tool to make informed climate actions.
How to get involved
Share your feedback: Do you have any suggestion for other challenges/problems (not listed here) that we should be considering? Feel free to share your thoughts and our team will be happy to look into it.
Do you find a challenge that’s interesting to you and/or aligns with your organization’s mission? We would greatly love to hear from you and workout different collaboration models. Kindly fill this partner engagement form and let’s get in touch.