The Assembly partners with Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation, and the UAE Ministry of Environment and Water

In October 2014, His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, on Saturday announced an initiative to measure the public’s happiness and satisfaction with government services presented to them on a daily basis through the distribution of electronic devices in all government departments linked directly to a central database that monitors this index and sends daily reports to decision makers.

Termed the happiness index, this formed the basis for a lot of customer facing innovation implemented by the Government Services, in the past as well as going forward. One of the key aspects of citizen happiness is the pollution levels in the city – and the only way to keep track of this is through Air Quality measurement. With 46 air quality stations in the country, as of June 2015, the UAE has a target of 90 percent adherence to the WHO air quality guidelines by 2021.

In order to achieve that target, The Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation, in collaboration with the UAE Ministry of Environment and Water, announced a unique challenge. The Ministry tasked ten top ICT universities in the UAE, such as Zayed University, Higher College of Technology, UAE University – Al Ain, and others, to pitch the best solution possible to be able to measure Air Quality with some measure of accuracy while ensuring the cost of deploying such a solution was below the maximum threshold set by the competition. The Assembly was one of the key external partners to this challenge that concluded in December 2015, to provide technology support where needed. The team of Eight Emirati girl students from Zayed University, led by Dr. Henrik Stahl, the Associate Professor at Zayed Univerisity, College of Sustainability Science and Humanities, chose to partner with The Assembly to stream line the process of how to deploy their concept across the country, as well as being able to monitor each installation individually for troubleshooting. Zayed University placed in the top three teams to present on the final day, and will be continuing to perfect their concept with the active support of The Assembly.