President caps 506 HIT students
PRESIDENT Mnangagwa yesterday capped 506 students at the 10th graduation ceremony of the Harare Institute and Technology.
Of the graduates 197 are women which constitute 39 percent of the total number that graduated yesterday.
In his remarks before the students were capped, HIT Vice Chancellor Engineer Quinton Kanhukamwe said the institution was reviewing its curriculum in line with the country’s needs.
“HIT has heeded the call and continues to interrogate its curriculum for relevance and responsiveness not only to the present but future needs as well.
“Education 5.0 is well situated within our programme frameworks as we escalate the development and commercialisation of technological solutions that are responsive and address national needs,” he said.
Eng Kanhukamwe added that HIT had introduced new postgraduate degree programmes that include Master of Technology in Machine Design, Master of Technology in Cloud Computing, Master of Technology in Strategy and Innovation, Master of Technology in Information Technology, Postgraduate Diploma in Medical Ultrasound and Postgraduate Diploma in Medical Dosimetry.
“These programmes respond to national and strategic priority areas and are aimed at providing practical hands-on technological expertise to industry and commerce and the health sectors of our economy,” he added.
The Vice-Chancellor said the institution research projects were aimed at making contributions to national development.
“In the context of the obtaining temporary economic challenges, we have absolute conviction that this is the time to proffer home grown solutions responsive to the needs of the various sectors of our economy,” Eng Kanhukamwe said.
He said some of the projects they had undertaken this academic year include an application of dry/fine grinding as an optimisation tool for gold recovery process by small scale miners in the country, flyash brick machine project, propagation and characterisation of indigenous plant resources for value addition and production of pharmaceutical products, food products and biochemical inputs.
“HIT continue to place a high premium to intellectual property registration. This we have registered seven patents, 39 utility models, eight industrial designs and 33 copyrights,” he said.
“Through our Technology Transfer and Commercialisation Centre we have established four start-ups, which emanated from the commercialisation of our intellectual property.”
These are Indocast which deal refractory materials, ferrous and non-ferrous casting and fabrication, Gensys which is into transformer production, Matsimba that is into production of fuel tracking system and fleet management and Instibytes which is into the design of software application packages.
Eng Kanhukamwe added that they continue to seek collaborations with local and international institutions that include Soonsil University of South Korea, Indian Institute of Technology and the Turkish Government which has funded the first phase of the establishment of the digital forensic laboratory at HIT.