Huawei honours award winning students from Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and Angola
by SAVIOUS KWINIKA
JOHANNESBURG – STUDENTS from Nigeria and Tanzania are the overall joint winners of this year’s Sub Saharan regional finals of Huawei’s global information and communications technology competition.
This follows the just-ended finals held in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Together with second prize winners, Angola and Kenya, the four teams will travel to China for the finals which will see 22 teams from around the world compete for the championship title.
The competition covered latest ICT technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, mobile networks and big data.
Almost 30 000 students from over 100 universities in Angola, Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia participated.
Xue Man, Vice President of Huawei, said, “Huawei understands the value of a good talent ecosystem which is the foundation for a smart future.”
He said the ICT competition is part of our innovative initiatives to
support that and promote industry skills.
“We believe that this event will inspire more students’ interest in ICT learning in Africa; it provides them with a world-class stage to showcase themselves and consolidate the vital ICT needed for Africa’s development,” Man said.
Alfred Cheruiyot, a representative from Kenya Ministry of Education praised Huawei’s actions to raise skills and partner with national governments and local tertiary institutions to strengthen the skills pool in ICT.
“We are fully aware how important this is for our students to get good jobs and to become successful entrepreneurs. We are fully aware that this will drive our economy forward for many years to come if we can get it right,” Cheruiyot told the gathering.
Tanzania student, Emanuel Chaula, was overjoyed that his team emerged as one of the two winning countries.
“We worked hard as a team because we wanted to seize the opportunity to get to travel to China to compete in the global finals,” Chaula said.
“We really want to show Africa and the world that Tanzania is an up and coming ICT player and we want to be a part of that growth in our country. We will study and practice for the finals in China as we are going there to win,” the ICT student added.
The Huawei ICT Competition is a global ICT talent competition exchange event, which is aimed at the Huawei Authorized Information and Network Technology College (Huawei ICT Academy) and related universities.
Since the first Huawei ICT Contest held in 2015, the number of
participants in the competition has grown exponentially and has become one of the largest ICT events in the world.
The 2018/19 event has attracted more than 1 000 universities in more than 50 countries around the world under the slogan “Connection, Glory and Future”.
The total number of students participating global was 80 000 students, including 28 000 students from Southern Africa.
– CAJ News
