Huawei partners with African universities to train 700,000 ICT professionals

Huawei Technologies has set an ambitious target of training nearly 1 million new ICT professionals in partnership with universities in Africa. Under the theme of “Connection, Glory, Future“, Huawei has invited bright university students from 70 countries and pursuing ICT courses to test their skills and competence through an intense assessment.

The ultimate aim is to increase academia collaboration with the ICT industry to advance the digital transformation of local industries.

This year, young Kenyans drawn from the University of Nairobi among others are part of a group of 15,000 students in 130 teams, from 500 top universities and colleges are participating in the assessment. They are tasked with designing and building innovative solutions on Huawei technological platforms, including the Cloud to address areas such as environmental protection and close societal gaps with digital skills.

Besides the traditional Network and Cloud Track, it includes an Innovation Track that will for the first time stretch the students’ creativity.

With a target of 700,000 skilled professionals trained by the year 2023, the firm is using its annual ICT assessment to examine the students for their ICT knowledge, practical skills and innovation acumen. The program also serves as a platform for talent placement, with 350 students having succeeded in getting jobs over the last 5 years.

Billed as the largest of its kind in Africa, Kenyan students will be keen to maintain the winning streak set in 2020 by the Mazingira Team from Kenya that presented a solution called ‘Wildfire PrediTec’ designed and built on Huawei IoT and AI platforms to detect, analyze, predict and prevent wildfires. They tied with two other teams from Uganda and Mauritius for the joint first prize while the grand prize was collected by a team from Nigeria

The sub-Saharan Africa finals are scheduled for February 2022 while the global finals will take place in May 2022.

Over the past 5 years, the competition has attracted over 80,000 passionate ICT students, with 21 teams entering the global finals, further incentivizing contestants to excel in this field.

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