St. Gracious Secondary School, Lira Leads Northern Region in ICT Innovations 2022
St. Gracious SS, Lira‘s ICT Club project titled “Green Smart Farm” emerged victorious beating the rest of the Schools in the Northern and West Regions at the competition that was held 6 June 2022 at Kolping Hotel, Masindi. The competing ICT Clubs present were Masindi SS, Arua SS, and Dr. Obote College Boroboro. This private school is one of the top-performing Schools though it is new on the scene. It is located in Lira district,
The ICT Club team working on this innovation includes Emmanuel Nicholas Opio, Agatha Marrion Kicarwot , Elvis Okoo , Linda Akello, Joshua Emmanuel Owel. The Club Patron is Teacher Jacob Otim
Overview: The president of the Republic of Uganda launched and emphasized the use of an irrigation scheme in Uganda. This in his wisdom thought would handle the issue of long dry spelt that in turn results into poor yield. However, the scheme/ irrigation method seems manual because it involves turning on and off of tunnels, pumps and so on.
This innovation aimed at reducing the hunger rate by embracing irrigation, handling labor shortages resulting from the manual irrigation method, solving the problem of inaccurate data seen by most farmers and agricultural institutions and modernization of agriculture (i.e. movement from subsistence type of farming to commercial)
Using the automatic irrigation system to solve the problem of water shortage during dry season, the system focuses on the use of sensors to monitor and automatically open the water channels unlike the manual method which involves the farmer turning on the pump, valves and even the directing water.
This will be possible through the moisture and humidity sensors. In this case, the system will automatically sense the amount of moisture in the soil, amount of humidity in the atmosphere and according turns on or off the system. The system can also dispense fertilizers and other farm managements such as monitoring plants health among others depending on the farmers requirements at any time.
Here is the Video of the presentation at the final Competition at the National Conference on Communications 2022 at Makerere University.
In conclusion, the system collects on data using sensors that provide information to the farmer through transmission from the automated system built.
