BK TecHouse Ltd, a subsidiary Innovative Technology company of Bank of Kigali Group PLC, is one of the leading Tech companies in Rwanda with services expending into Agriculture, Education, Real Estate and Healthcare.
BK TecHouse is dedicated to delighting its customers, employees and shareholders by providing high quality Innovative Technology products and services that empower its customers to strive in a fast-changing market.
In January 2018, BK TecHouse organized the first Rwanda Robotics boot camp themed “Shaping the workforce of the future to strive in a digital world”. The camp was sponsored by Bank of Kigali, the largest commercial bank in assets and market share; and ran by Makes Robotics Academy, a company that has ran many similar programs in Nigeria and had three students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) specializing in Robotics giving training to the forty students, 22 girls and 18 boys between the age of 14 and 17, selected among top of their classes in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) sections from schools around the country.
Speaking with Mr. Regis Rugemanshuro, CEO of BK TecHouse, he remarked that the objective of the camp was much more than just training the youth on how to build Robots. “The objective was to also show the students that they can build robots, useful robots! It was about giving them that confidence and teaching them new ways of solving problems by working together and smarter using technology”. He noted that in a world where technology is disrupting existing business models and enabling new ones; in world where it is no longer the big beating the small but the fast beating the slow, we must train our youth to think big and outside of the box when solving today’s problems.
In his remarks during the Africa tech Summit, Mr. Regis Rugemanshuro expressed that the outcome from the camp was far more than what was expected. Selected students who had never built robots, nor wrote software programs before, not only picked up the material quickly but were also able to start writing their own logic instructing the robots to do more tasks than just those assigned by the instructors. Yasipi Buwihirwe (girl) and Regis Rugerinyange (boy) who attended the robotics Camp and represented the other students in Africa Tech Summit 2018, were both excited and inspired by what they learnt from the Rwanda robotics camp and have the intention to go on studying Robotics engineering, and someday build made in Rwanda Robotic solutions for agriculture, health and infrastructure sectors.
Rwanda, a landlocked country with a population a little over 12 million has been working very hard and making significant progress to shift from agriculture-based economy to become a knowledge-based and service-oriented economy. Similar investments in training the youth in new ways to solving problems using cutting edge technologies, is one of the many effective ways to build a confident youth prepared to face and compete in a digital world. This year, the students were tasked to build robots that could improve quality and production capacity by addressing problems in agriculture, a sector that employs 70% of population and contributes to a third of the GDP (Finscope report 2016). The demonstrated final prototypes included robots that can do irrigation, spray pesticides, separate seeds, do vertical farming, plant, harvest, and more faster, better and longer than the human being. They all proved to be of high potential and gave hope to see finished made in Rwanda robots sooner than later.
According to Mr. Regis Rugemanshuro, BK TecHouse plans to organize bigger and better camps in the future, and not only in robotics but in other areas of technology as well. “Living by our slogan of Powering Innovation, we will continue to create and deliver high quality products and services while at the same time investing in the youth to ensure they are in shape and fit to strive in a digital world. Ultimately contributing the build the Rwanda we want”.
