Engineer

And why do we focus on this? Well, it's one of the most important channels for B2B marketers, especially those of us in engineering and manufacturing.

And in fact, our State of Marketing to Engineers report found that 53% of engineers value LinkedIn.

It's ranked the second highest in social media behind YouTube.

So it's really

I have MJ over here playing Mr.

Engineer.

You're gonna be able to work-

And he's pretty good about it.

[upbeat music] This week, we are going to Uganda to hear the story of Airco.

How did it begin? What did they discover? And after almost a decade, what does the future look like? My guest is Professor Engineer Bainomugisha, a professor of computer science at Makerere University and Project Lead at Airco.

He has been part of the journey from those early experiments to building one of Africa's most recognized air quality monitoring platforms.

Professor Engineer, welcome to Clean Air Report, Ghana.

Yeah, thank you.

Professor Engineer, and yes, Engineer is his real name.

Let's go all the way back.

How did Airco actually start? What was the problem you were trying to solve?

Because working at Costco is great if that's going to help your child get the life that they want.

Working as a skilled technician so they can get training to move into an engineering role, even if they do need a degree eventually to get a P.E., first right out of high school is a better route than sending them to college for engineering that is the way of the future and the reason it's the way of the future is because it's the way of the past that's what you used to do people weren't out here buying college degrees right out of high school and walking into a mid-level job that's just not how it works and it's always been artificial and that is it's just everything is just correcting everything's just self-correcting and you can see this with the infighting in our country too with like oh, maybe we can do three-year degrees.

Oh, maybe we can just shave time off of this because the conclusion they're all inevitably going to reach is that they don't need degrees at all because that's where internationally countries are realizing that that's just not a viable way to train your workforce because putting them in debt right out of high school is not a viable way to create good economic growth.

It's not a good way to get your young people to have families.

There's so much to unpack there, and I have so many questions.

Can we start with your parents and their support of you becoming an engineer? From what I understand from what you just said, they were sort of tricked into thinking that audio engineering was some sort of subsect of mechanical engineering or aeronautical engineering.

Is that what I'm understanding?

I mean, just any type of engineering, you know, like, I mean, I guess they thought it was going to be a little bit more mathematical and technical and maybe have like more opportunities, you know, like work wise.

That's I think that's what they thought

from one of those countries, Mexico, where like People don't really, you know, like you have to be like a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer or something like that.

Those are like the respectable careers.

So my parents were always super supportive of me.