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By Wallace Mawire
The Harare Institute of Technology (HIT) is hosting a tech-innovation expo week from Monday 26 September to Saturday 1 October 2022 at its University Campus in Belvedere, Harare to provide a platform for academia, captains of industry, and the engineering sector to discuss the future of the country’s manufacturing industry.
According to Tinashe Mutema, the HIT Director of Communications and International Relations, the expo is running under the theme” Creating synergies with industry through innovation, technology, and research.”
Mutema said that the expo is characterized by a public lecture, hackathon, research symposium with exhibitions, a biomedical symposium, and on Saturday on the final day, it will end on a high note with a Vice Chancellor’s scholarship fundraising golf tournament at the Borrowdale Brooke Golf Club in Harare.
“The objective is to create a perfect opportunity to network, create synergies as well as create brand visibility,” Mutema said.
Ben Rafemoyo, the Chief Executive Officer of the Engineering Council of Zimbabwe (ECZ), Guest of Honour at the expo on Tuesday said that the theme of the symposium is in sync with the trend of the moment in the country in engineering 5.0 which he said is a concept Zimbabweans need to grow into and embrace as it represents the future.
“The notion of industry 5.0 is rooted in the idea of people working alongside robots and smart machines. It talks about our robot friends helping us work better, smarter and faster by leveraging on advanced Internet of Things (IoT) and harnessing the power of big data. This hot concept also emphasizes the paramount need for sustainability in all the new technologies employed in manufacturing,’ he said.
He added that in order to achieve sustainability in a manufacturing environment, the efficient and safe use of engineering, mathematical, statistical, and scientific techniques have to be correctly used so as to design, analyze, implement and improve systems of machines, materials, people, and information.
Engineer Rafemoyo also said that there is a need to keep in mind that the homegrown solutions of the country need to be industry 5.0 ready.
He also urged the HIT and other engineering institutions in the country in collaboration with the private sector to carry out joint and interdisciplinary research and development initiatives that produce appropriate technology for value addition of locally available raw materials in the various sectors of the economy as he said that it is the foundation for the country to realize the dream that is collectively shared by all at the symposium and beyond.
According to Engineer Mary Chikuruwo, Head of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at the HIT, who are the organizers of the expo, the objective of the national symposium on Sustainable Manufacturing Technologies is to seek ways to maximize systems already in existence and to introduce new sustainable designs in an effort to achieve a world-class economy by the year 2030 in the country.
She said that the main talking points of the symposium are world-class manufacturing, the Internet of Things, Sustainable Development Goals in global Manufacturing, Sustainable Engineering, Circular economy, and Maintenance 4.0.
“The idea would be for experts to weigh in on the nexus and their take pertaining to local industry and the direction we as technocrats can take. At the end of the discussion a small resolution can be made then about what we can and what we should do,” Engineer Chikuruwo said.