Huawei Uganda has today awarded a Trio of Students who represented Uganda at the recently concluded ICT global competition Africa Stage. Just like Previous ICT academy rounds, the students emerged winners at the Sub-Saharan Africa regional stage and are set to take on the final Global Stage early next year.
Run under the theme of “Connection, Glory, Future”, the four-day competitions kicked off on 10th September 2020 with participation in over 14 Sub-Saharan African countries and attracted over 50,000 students.
Student teams were grouped into two groups based on skillset and region of participation. Of the two, the Winning team consisting of two Muni University students and one from Lira University succeeded in Winning the regional competition against other African Countries.
Globally the 2019-2020 round of the Huawei ICT Competition has covered over 70 countries worldwide with over 150,000 contestants from 2,000 universities and colleges.
In Africa the competition was launched 5years ago as a Huawei commitment to skilling new ICT talent necessary for fast industry innovation and adoption.
During the awarding ceremony, the Chief Guest and Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance Hon. Bagiire Vicent Waiswa commended Huawei for the ICT Competition initiative that has mobilized several Ugandan students to build new skills making them market-ready.
“As far as the ministry is concerned, developing human capital is extremely important and we look at initiatives such as these (Huawei ICT Competition) as an avenue that we can utilize to build the capacity of our ICT professionals and therefore build substantial ICT ecosystem,” he added.
Hon. Bagiire Vicent Waiswa – Permanent Secretary Ministry of ICT
In Uganda, the first edition of the Huawei ICT competition started in 2018 with 1300 students from several public universities.
Then, In 2019, over 2500 students from Makerere, Kyambogo, Mbarara, Nkozi, Mbarara, Kabale, Lira, Gulu, Muni, UCU, and MUBS Universities braced the competition with courses in Network and Cloud deployment.
The Network associate path consists of Routing & Switching, Security, and WLAN. Then, Cloud consists of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, Cloud Computing, and Storage part of the HCIA course catalog granted to students.
According to one of the winners Doreen Nalwoga, a computer science student from Lira University. The Huawei ICT Competition has acted as a career exposure path to new technologies and innovative opportunities.
“Firstly I would like to thank Huawei Uganda for having given us an opportunity to increase our exposure, knowledge, skills, and experience. We have attained professional certification at no cost, facilitation and awards. I am personally certified with HCIA Security, HCIA Router and Switch, HCIA WLAN. Am currently finalizing an additional course to be a Huawei Certified Internetwork Professional (HCIP R&S). This means I am capable of designing, implementing and maintaining enterprise networks already,”
said Doreen.
Speaking at the awards ceremony, the Huawei Uganda Managing Director, Mr. Gao Fei, said that the competition is relevant to every ICT student and professional due to its comprehensive approach to skills development for employment, enhanced productivity and growth.
“We congratulate team Uganda for the tremendous success. The Huawei ICT Competition and Academy is a comprehensive approach of skills development for employment, enhanced productivity and growth. Training contents in this program has been aligned with skills requirements in the job market. That is why we re-dedicate ourselves to working even more closely with universities across the country to better equip students with the next generation of technologies and create the platform for the Ugandan students to demonstrate they are capable of maturing into world-class experts,”
Mr. Gao Fei – Managing Director, Huawei Uganda
Statistically, with a series of ICT Talent campaigns across sub-saharan Africa, Huawei aims at skilling more than 700,000 ICT Professions by 2023. Hence, the annual ICT competition which keeps students a notch ahead through fierce Global and regional rounds will further help the brand achieve its set academy goal.