Huawei has today awarded three Ugandan university students; Doreen Nalwoga, Shaffick Nyanzi and Emmanuel Kiguli after they won the Huawei ICT global competition on the African stage representing Uganda — toppling 14 other African countries. The students; Shaffick Nyanzi and Emmanuel Kiguli are from Muni University and Doreen Nalwoga is from Lira University.
These shall now proceed to the global finals in China to compete at global level in November 2020.
The Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance and Chief guest Hon. Bagiire Vicent Waiswa commended Huawei for the ICT Competition initiative that mobilizes young Ugandans to build their capacity and skills with a view of making them market ready.
“I thank Huawei for this initiative that mobilizes Ugandans to build their capacity and skills with a view of making them market ready. By market ready I mean you take these Ugandans and give them the necessary exposure through competition for them to be able to come back home and utilized the skills they have learned,” he said.
“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 eco system,” he added.
The Managing Director Huawei Uganda, Mr. Gao Fei, said that the competition is very relevant to every ICT student and professional because it’s a comprehensive approach of skills development for employment, enhanced productivity and growth.
“We congratulate team Uganda for the tremendous success thus far. 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,” said Fei.
To recap, the first edition of the Huawei ICT competition in Uganda started in 2018 with 1300 students from the various public universities. In 2019, over 2500 students from Makerere, Kyambogo, Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Nkozi, Mbarara, Kabale, Lira, Gulu, Muni, Uganda Christian University, and Makerere University Business School 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 exams, national exams and Regional exams.
With a series of talent ecosystem campaigns in Sub Saharan Africa, including the ICT competition, Huawei hopes to skill up more than 700,000 ICT professionals by 2023.
