“This is not your PhD, it is for Namibia”

Q. How do you feel about obtaining your PhD?

A. I am super elated. I give tremendous gratitude to my supervisors Prof Blake (UCT Emeritus Professor), Prof Winschiers-Theophilus (NUST) and Mr Uariaike Mbinge (OvaHimba lead community co-designer). One of my good friends said, “This is not your PhD, it is for Namibia. For her and her people” (Muashekele, 2020).

Q. What are your research interests and why?

A. Co-designing crowdsourcing software solutions with indigenous communities to empower the communities to appropriate mainstream software solutions from their context of meaning-making and continuation of independent use. 

Q. Where would you want to see the Faculty in ten years?

A. Firstly, in the very near future, I would like to see the roll out of much-needed degrees for the 4IR and beyond, such as a multidisciplinary Master Degree in Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Human-to-Computer Interaction (HCI) with meaningful Human-to-Human interactions, and Machine Learning. 

Departing with the above-stated trajectory, within ten years, I see FCI making a considerable contribution to Namibia by providing a technological enhancement in co-creating technologies with national and global communities for the wellbeing of their livelihood. 

I envisage the Faculty nourishing the agriculture, tourism, TechHub start-up companies, smart city research with the City of Windhoek and many more. I further foresee the expansion of the India-Namibia Centre of Excellence in Information Technology (CEIT) hosted at FCI in its mandate of training computer scientists in Cyber Network Security, and Big Data Analytics. 

Last, but certainly not least, I see an increase in our e-Governance/Industry research partnership in High-Performance Computing (HPC).