Huawei sponsors varsity students in ICT courses

Huawei Botswana has sponsored 20 students in support of government’s initiatives promoting innovation and ICT learning. The development comes after the company signed with five universities to become Huawei ICT academies, giving students access to industrially-recognised certification courses.

“In order to bridge the ICT skills gap and fostering ICT talent pool required for national socio-economic development, Huawei Botswana has been working with the government and academic partners to up skill the new generation. “Top students in the university will be provided with the latest training in technologies sponsored abroad during the ‘Seeds for the Future Program’,” said Hu Cunhao, Enterprise Account Manager at Huawei Botswana.

Cunhao said with rapid advancement in emerging technologies, industries are poised to grow accordingly, thereby changing the very nature of jobs. “The inadequacy of ICT skills is increasingly becoming a bottleneck for embracing opportunities in the digital era,” he said. Cunhao said Huawei emphasizes on fostering an open and sustainable ICT talent ecosystem to equip the new generation with employable skills and increased competencies required in the job market. “Huawei is thus working closely with universities across the country to achieve this.”

On the other hand, the global leading ICT solutions provider is hosting ‘Connection, Glory, Future’ which aims to provide a platform for global ICT talents to showcase their ability, compete and communicate, while encouraging ICT-related study and drives the growth of a robust ICT talent ecosystem.Students registered for the competition had the opportunity to access learning materials online and the certification portfolio provided by Huawei was free of charge.

Eleven winners have been announced after a national final from over 500 students registered from mainly three universities - University of Botswana (UB), Botho University, Botswana International University of Science & Technology (BIUST) and Botswana Accountancy College (BAC).The students had the opportunity to choose between two tracks, the network and the cloud track. According to Huawei, the network track contains a mix of several technologies such as WLAN, security, routing and switching while the cloud track consists of cloud computing, storage, big data and artificial intelligence.