Scholarship Story: “Aid has become completely unreliable. Camps need food security”

South Sudanese refugee Francis Monaja, 30, is earning his MSc in Advanced Robotics from Queen Mary University in London. He plans to create an AI-supported automated irrigation system to increase food security in East Africa.

Hi Francis! Tell us a little about yourself.
I was born in 1995 in Laboni, very close to the border between Uganda and what is now South Sudan. The region was affected by conflict spilling over from Uganda, with rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) fighting against the Ugandan army. When I was 11, we fled first to Uganda, where my grandmother and aunties stayed, and then my mother took the rest of us to Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya.

I joined the primary school at the camp and struggled at first. I had grown up speaking Acholi and Juba Arabic, and now was learning Swahili as we were following the Kenyan curriculum. Luckily, as maths and science are ‘universal’, they still came easily to me. I would go around the camp buying cheap used textbooks from older students and study them on my own. Learning in the camp wasn’t easy, as the schools are so congested, and when a friend of my mother’s suggested I enrol in Kalobeyei Boarding Primary School, where there were other refugee students, my mum agreed.

Within the first term at the new school I had become the top student. I couldn’t believe it. All my studying of those old textbooks in Swahili, maths, science and history had really paid off. In the meantime, my mum left Kakuma with my four siblings and moved to another camp in Uganda while I was at boarding school. She put me under the care of her friend Angelina, who had first told her about the boarding school, and who today still lives in Kakuma.

I completed my secondary school in Kakuma, and then received a WTI scholarship to study my BSc in Computer Technology at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology in Nairobi. After I graduated in 2019, I got an internship with the software engineering company Meliora Technologies Limited, who then hired me full time. I became a lead developer, which was great - I was doing real things in the real world. But I had a project of my own that I wanted to fully develop.

Francis teaching robotics at Kakuma refugee settlement in Kenya.

What made you want to apply for a WTI postgraduate scholarship?

When I was doing my undergrad, I did a project on automated irrigation systems and created a prototype which could work in semi-arid areas like Kenya. The university selected my project for incubation after I graduated in 2019. I called it “Agromanna”, because it’s food in the desert. The story behind the name comes from the Bible: when the Israelites moved to Egypt, God provided food (manna) for them.

I needed more skills in robotics and Mechatronics to continue developing Agromanna. Food insecurity is at its worst In Kakuma right now as a result of cuts in foreign aid. The settlement is home to 300,000 refugees, all of whom are now receiving just a fraction of the food rations they had a few months previously. Malnutrition rates have increased and there are now warnings of starvation.

Furthermore, the entire Turkana region, particularly the host community, is also facing food insecurity. If the camps could grow their own food and feed themselves, they wouldn’t be affected by these reductions in foreign aid. They would have food security.

I applied to the Commonwealth masters scholarship nominated by WTI, this time for an MSc in Advanced Robotics at Queen Mary University in London. My focus has been on optimising water usage for the automated irrigation system. I’ve been using AI called deep reinforcement learning (DRL) coupled with a Bayesian network. This helps with uncertainties in the data that we collect from the weather station, regarding wind, precipitation and other parameters.

What do you plan to do next?

Being here, on this course, has been great. I’m getting the expertise and the connections I need to take Agromanna to the next level. The goal is to have Agromanna be used not just around Kakuma, but also all across the Horn of Africa like Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia, in areas prone to famine. This model is workable. There are projects like it already in Dubai and Israel, so I know it’s not unachievable. I’m just working on getting it done.

The best-case scenario would be to get funding and implement the project. If I can achieve that, that would be great.