JG Afrika has cultivated its Innovation Programme since its official launch in 2019. This initiative has formalised the company’s ability to pivot and initiate, which has been behind JG Afrika’s growth over the past 100 plus years.
“JG Afrika is excited about our Innovation Programme. We already have 15 innovative concepts that we are developing further on a continuous basis. They cut across the spectrum of transformative and sustaining innovation, as well as efficiency improvement. These ideas also transcend the various JG Afrika disciplines, considering our intense focus on also pushing boundaries in-terms of cross-disciplinary interactions. This while further exploring inwardly how we can become more efficient at what we do,” Suvritha Ramphal, an Executive Associate of JG Afrika and part of the company’s Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Division, says.
Ramphal is also an Innovation Co-ordinator, a role she shares with Chris Wise, a Technical Director of JG Afrika and Head of the company’s Wastewater Division.
Ramphal is responsible for ensuring momentum of the Innovation Programme across all of JG Afrika’s branches. Meanwhile, Wise is tasked with developing the best concepts for eventual commercialisation.
A case in point is a new idea in the health and safety sector that JG Afrika is on the verge of developing into a product. Various business plans are now being explored to eventually take the system to market.
This idea was discussed at a shareholders meeting in October 2019 where it became evident that an idea to improve JG Afrika’s internal system could be marketed as an external product.
One of the sectors of the Innovation Programme is data science and machine learning, with the company actively exploring the future potential of these data analytics approaches across all disciplines and its potential role within existing processes. This will ensure that JG Afrika is ahead of the curve in terms of the impact that it will have on business, within its business and larger industry and its competitors.
“This is a completely new playing field for the engineering and environmental sciences disciplines. Therefore, it is going to take time to find the correct configuration and then integrate data sciences into our disciplines. We know that it will not get it correct the first-time round and have, therefore, allowed time to fail, learn from our mistakes and grow form there,” Ramphal says.
Harnessing cutting-edge technologies, engineers and environmental scientists will be able to play an even greater role in improving the lives of communities.
A case in point is the way in which digital technologies have bridged the data divide to enhance the monitoring and evaluation of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) projects in southern Africa. Considering the role that open-source data is playing in enabling WASH projects to reach the “last mile”, this technology is also widely supported by the development finance institutions.
As a WASH specialist, Ramphal has first-hand experience working with an array of these technologies.
“To reach those many areas of the continent that remain unserved by most water operators, we need quality data. This enables us to know exactly what it is that we need to efficiently manage these projects. Technology has facilitated this and, in so doing, has enabled us to make major strides towards meeting Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, which is to achieve universal and equitable access to WASH for all. This also supports the other SDGs as there can be no sustainability without access to water, sanitation and hygiene,” Ramphal concludes.
