Three Makerere University students who excelled in the preliminary and national final Huawei ICT exams have been chosen to represent Uganda in the Huawei ICT global competition at its regional final stage in South Africa.
Kenneth Magola, Stephen Okello, and Gerald Mudulo emerged the top three students and will fly to South Africa in March to participate in the regional finals. They will compete with other African countries and later in May to China with the rest of the world if they win the regional finals.
With the theme “Connection, Glory, Future”, the Huawei 2019/20 Global ICT competition aims to provide a platform for global ICT talents to showcase their ability, compete and communicate, encouraging ICT-related study and drive the growth of a robust ICT talent ecosystem.
Huawei Uganda Human Resource Director, Mr. Liaoshuangquan, said the competition is relevant to every ICT student and professionals because of its comprehensive approach to skills development for employment, enhanced productivity and growth.
“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,” he says.
The second edition of the competition in Uganda attracted over 2500 university students who registered to participate. And out of those 100 excelled to the national final exam, and only 3 were been selected for the regional and global finals.
Mr. Liaoshuangquan however noted that that the top 11 students among the 100 national finalists will be awarded with Huawei professional certificates and job opportunities at Huawei Uganda.
Meanwhile, the 2500 students were from Makerere, Kyambogo, Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Nkozi, Mbarara, Kabale, Lira, Gulu, Muni, Uganda Christian University, and Makerere University Business School (MUBS).
The second edition of this skilling competition began in Oct. 2019 with several roadshows in the different universities [mentioned above] and also a boot camp training to prepare the competition participants to do the exams.
Lira University 
Gulu University 
Kyambogo University 
Muni University
The participating students accessed learning material free of charge on the Huawei online learning platform in the various courses such as Network and Cloud track. The network track consists of Router & Switch, Security and Wireless LAN while Cloud track consists of Artificial intelligence, Big Data, Cloud Computing, and Storage.
These studied and were subjected to preliminary and national exams of which the top three students emerged all coming from Makerere University.
Through the continued initiative to bridge the ICT skills gap and fostering ICT talent pool needed for national social economic development, Huawei Uganda has been working with the government and academic partners since May 2019 to open up its academies in the various universities of Uganda.
So far, six academies have been opened in MUK, MUBS, Soroti, Muni, Nkozi, MUST, and Kabale university.
