Huawei Global ICT Competition attracts over 6000 University Students

Huawei Global ICT Competition, with the theme; “Connection, Glory and Future”, has kick started at Makerere University, attracting over 6000 University Students. The students are drawn from various tertiary institutions across Uganda. The Huawei 2019-2020 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.

Liu jiawei, the Managing Director of Huawei Uganda, said areas of the competition will vary along with different subjects like; network, Cloud Computing, artificial intelligence, and big data. He observed that; ICT skills gap has increasingly become a bottleneck for embracing opportunities in the digital era, as across all industries are poised to grow with rapid advances in emerging technologies, changing the very nature of the jobs.

“We need a comprehensive approach of skills development for employment, enhanced productivity and growth. Training contents must be 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 a world-class expert,.” he said.

Skills gaps across all industries are poised to grow in the Fourth Industrial Revolution globally. There will also be a strong demand for ICT-related skills. According to the World Economic Forum, at least 133 million new roles generated as a result of the new division of labor between humans, machines, and algorithms may emerge globally by 2022. In Uganda, the ICT skills gap is also a challenge. The report by National Information Technology Authority shows that within MDAs, ICT personnel accounts for only 1.9 per cent of the total workforce.

To bridge the ICT skills gap and fostering ICT talent pool needed for national social-economic development, Huawei Uganda has been working with government, industrial and academic partners in up skilling engineers, providing certification courses, sponsoring aboard studies and supporting government’s initiatives in promoting innovation and ICT learning. Huawei Uganda has so far signed up six universities across Uganda in the launch establishment of academies, where students can access to industrially-recognized certification courses.