The University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Associate Professor Joyce Mwangama is utilizing synthetic intelligence (AI) to place 5G in the palms of individuals who have by no means touched a router.
A rural clinic in Limpopo wants a dependable web connection to obtain a surgical session from a specialist 400 km away. A small-scale farmer wants her soil sensors speaking to one another and to a dashboard she will learn on her cellphone. Neither the clinic nor the farm has an IT division. Neither can afford to rent one.
This is the drawback Associate Professor Mwangama is attempting to unravel – and he or she is just not doing it by coaching a brand new giant language mannequin.
The barrier is just not the technology
South Africa has 5G. The spectrum exists, the {hardware} exists, and the requirements our bodies have been engaged on sixth-generation networks for years. What doesn’t exist, in most of the nation, is the technical capability to deploy and handle non-public 5G networks – the variety operated independently of main community suppliers, typically known as personal networks or non-public mobile networks.
The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) has recognized this instantly: the complexity of working 5G infrastructure is the major barrier to adoption past main city centres. You can have the quickest community in the world sitting in a warehouse however it’s ineffective if nobody in a 200 km radius is aware of methods to change it on.
“Closing the access gap means addressing the complexity gap first. I have always believed that impact beyond academia should be the goal of research, not an afterthought.”
Mwangama’s venture, AI4Open6GNet, addresses this at the level of friction. Instead of requiring an engineering staff to configure a community, the system accepts a plain-language description of what the community must do, for instance: “support 10 soil sensors and two video streams”. It then interprets that into a totally configured, deployed and self-managing non-public 5G community. No specialist is required.
“The two are deeply tied,” mentioned Mwangama. “Network complexity is itself a barrier to access. Many communities and businesses are in a position to deploy their own networks, but the specialist knowledge required puts that out of reach. Closing the access gap means addressing the complexity gap first. I have always believed that impact beyond academia should be the goal of research, not an afterthought – so to have that recognised alongside scientific merit in the same award feels like a validation of that idea.”
Built on 20 years of collaboration
The venture is a three-way partnership between UCT, the University of Limpopo and Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin). It is just not a brand new relationship. Mwangama’s analysis group has labored with TU Berlin for over twenty years, a collaboration that started together with her late PhD supervisor and continues now with Professor Thomas Magedanz, who holds the chair of the TU Berlin Focus Research Unit.
The open supply 5G campus community platform the staff is constructing on, Open6GNet.org, was co-founded by UCT and TU Berlin. AI4Open6GNet provides the intelligence layer that makes that infrastructure genuinely usable by non-experts.
The venture was introduced in May 2026 at the thirtieth anniversary celebration of the South Africa–Germany bilateral science and technology cooperation programme. It is collectively funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF) and Germany’s Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) below the ZADE-AI name.
Three use instances, one province
The South African pilot websites are grounded in Limpopo, the place the University of Limpopo – a co-principal investigator on this venture – supplies direct entry to farming communities.
In years two and three of the venture, the staff will deploy a personal 5G Internet of Things (IoT) community for precision agriculture at an actual farm website – crop monitoring, soil sensing and yield prediction, operated by the group itself. There can be no engineers on website as soon as it’s operating.
The healthcare software targets rural clinics with no viable connectivity and no on-site IT employees. The intention is real-time communication for distant diagnostics and surgical mentoring in settings the place dependable connectivity has by no means existed.
The third software is schooling. UCT’s personal postgraduate course on 5G and open programmable networks, EEE5138Z, serves as a stay take a look at case: college students deploy and function actual 5G infrastructure as half of their coaching. The identical mannequin is meant for colleges and smaller universities which have by no means been capable of afford the complexity.
What the NRF selected to fund – and why it issues
The NRF transient for this name was particular. Researchers weren’t requested to construct new AI fashions. The query put to them was what AI might truly do for society – for agriculture, healthcare, schooling – and the funding adopted the solutions.
The NRF additionally made a deliberate choice about who would obtain that funding. Awards below this name had been directed towards traditionally deprived establishments. Scientific benefit and redress had been utilized by means of the identical aggressive course of, not as separate concerns.
What the venture will ship
By 2028, AI4Open6GNet goals to publish an open-source AI toolkit by means of Open6GNet.org, alongside deployment blueprints usable by any group or college on the continent. At least three joint peer-reviewed publications are deliberate, in addition to coverage briefs to the nationwide Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) and ICASA on enabling non-public and community-owned 5G networks.
Three PhD college students – one every at UCT, TU Berlin and the University of Limpopo – and 6 or extra grasp’s college students will work towards these deliverables. The intention is just not a product. It is infrastructure that belongs to the individuals who want it most.
Associate Professor Joyce Mwangama relies at the Telkom Centre of Excellence in the Department of Electrical Engineering at UCT. AI4Open6GNet builds on prior work from the EU Horizon Europe DIGITAfrica venture, with deployments already stay at universities in South Africa, Senegal, Kenya, Cameroon and Tunisia. For extra data, go to open6gnet.org and digitafrica.eu.