Wireless Planet Launches 3 LoRaWAN Community Gateways
Admin June 20th, 2025 03:20 PM
In recent developments of LoRaWAN research studies, Wireless Planet launched 3 network gateways to support IoT innovations in Marsabit and Busia Counties. Working with Juhudi Mashinani and other partners, Wireless planet installed (for the first time ever!) a LoRaWAN network at Tiigo School in Marsabit County! The network was installed alongside a weather station within the school to contribute to climate adaptation efforts within the county and to also support the academic institution to learn weather science through their geography lessons.
Following up to the installation in Marsabit County, Wireless Planet (WP), working with Strathmore University’s iLabAfrica, in collaboration with GIZ, Smart Africa and Intellecap, are implementing a hyperlocalised weather-based precision agriculture project to enable climate adaptation and data-driven farming for farmers in Busia County. Through the project, 25 weather stations have been deployed in various schools in the Sub-counties of Butula and Nambale.
The deployment has also been done within the “Africa LoRaWAN Community” concept that targets to set-up LoRaWAN infrastructure across Africa (in partnership with the African Advanced Level Telecommunications Institute [AFRALTI]) to support Internet of Things (IoT) innovation on the African continent. In both Sub-counties, two multichannel LoRaWAN gateways have been installed at St. Mary’s Girls Butula Primary School and St. Paul’s Namahindi Secondary School. The networks provide a low-power, wide area network capability of transmitting data from all the IoT-based weather stations within the two sub-counties without a need of SIM card technology.
The data transmitted from the stations include temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, light intensity, UV index as well as rainfall levels. A platform that descriptively shares the trends of these parameters on a daily, weekly and monthly basis is under development through the url: https://weather.wirelessplanet.co.ke/ to enable stakeholder access of the trends of these weather parameters – both descriptively and predictively.
Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) models are currently being implemented on the continuous data collected by the weather stations to deliver more insightful information to the farmers in the sub-counties to achieve the desired data-driven agricultural practices as identified during the farmer engagement exercises conducted at the time of installation of the weather stations. AI is envisioned to deliver more value to the farmers in enabling their assessment of weather conditions to improve their yield, efficiency in their farming practices and environmental sustainability. In combination with other extensive datasets from groups such as the Kenya Meteorological Department (KMD), Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organisation (KALRO), Kenya National Farmers Federation (KENAFF) among other stakeholder, the approach targets to provide predictive analytics and decision-making for smallholder farmers.
While Busia County has provided the foundation of the project, the scalability strategies targets to expand the work to support a wider range of smallholder farmers across Kenya and possibly, expand to other countries on the continent.
The installation of the Gateways demonstrates a milestone in the LoRaWAN Community initiatives to support both Busia and Marsabit IoT innovations by various groups developing Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs)-based solutions. Wireless Planet is presently organising a LoRaWAN Community workshop in October 2025 in Kigali Rwanda, to showcase the IoT experiences in East Africa – driven by LoRaWAN.
