Uganda will be represented by nine students; six from network track (Makerere University), and three from cloud track (Muni University) in the Huawei global ICT Competition final that is taking place this weekend.

Huawei ICT Competition is a competitive ICT talent exchange program developed globally for university, college and TVET students. This aims to promote the healthy development of the ICT talent ecosystem and support the integration of industry and education.

Launched in the African region just six years ago, the Competition has developed into the largest ICT skills competition in Africa and the world at large.

The final will start with an opening ceremony on Friday 17th June 2022, then Saturday 18th June will be the examination day where the exercise will be conducted for five hours (written and lab exam). Uganda students shall battle over 150 teams globally representing over 40 countries.

The results shall come out the following week on Tuesday 21st June.

In May, 2022, Huawei, the leading ICT global solutions provider, awarded the 2021 Seeds for the Future Finalists and the 2021-2022 Huawei Regional ICT Competition finalists.

Under the theme of “Connection, Glory, Future”, the nine month long Huawei ICT competition for Sub Saharan Africa was finalized on 19th February, 2022 with over 16 countries and 38 teams sitting for written and laboratory exams. The competition attracted over 15,000 participants from Sub-Saharan Africa from 500 universities.

Globally, the Huawei ICT Competition 2021 covered over 80 countries worldwide, with 150 000 contestants from more than 2,000 universities and colleges.

According to Huawei Uganda Public Relations Director, Mr Gaojian, “Huawei Uganda approached over 15 universities and interested them in the 2021 ICT Competition. We registered 750 students and opened for them our free online learning platforms in the various courses of Network and cloud. The network track consists of Datacom, 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 where we attained the first and second position.”

Michelle Chemutai, a telecom engineer, at Makerere University and one of the regional level winners, recently expressed her gratitude to the exposure Huawei had accorded to them.

“The competition was very intimidating and at the same time exciting. The thought of competing with creme de la creme teams from different countries was frightening. Taking the first position made me really feel good about myself and increased my self-confidence. Thanks to Huawei,” she said.

She added that, “This competition was a new experience for me as an individual. it taught me team work and coordination and that hard work actually pays off. This competition literally forced us to give in our best. Also, I got a lot of exposure in the network field and learnt how to do the practical lab configurations that isn’t taught at the university.”

LEAP programme:

In April this year, Huawei announced the launch of its LEAP digital skills development programme aimed at helping advance the ICT skills of more than 100,000 people across the Sub-Saharan Africa region within three years, according to the Chinese tech conglomerate.

LEAP – an acronym for Leadership, Employability, Advancement and Possibilities – is aimed at fostering strong digital leadership and a skilled ICT workforce, building a digital talent pool, and promoting digital literacy among citizens. It includes a wide range of activities spanning from ICT training and certification courses to government digital capacity building and ICT skills competitions.

Launching the LEAP programme, Huawei Southern Africa President, Leo Chen stressed the importance of ICT skills transfer and talent development and underlined Huawei’s consistent emphasis on it.

“Digitisation is deeply rooted in people. Because we digitise for people and by people. When roots are deep, there is no need to fear the wind,” he said.

“Through the programme, we strive to cultivate more youth leaders in ICT, who can explore more possibilities for themselves, their families, community and ultimately their nations.”

According to the company, Huawei has, over the past two decades, helped advance the ICT skills of more than 80,000 people across the sub-Saharan Africa region. In doing so, it says it has helped increase youth employability and bridge the gender gap in the ICT industry. Huawei itself is an employer of choice in the region. Its subsidiaries in 9 Sub-Saharan African countries earned the Top Employer seal in 2021.

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.

The Minister of ICT and National Guidance and the Managing Director Huawei Uganda, Mr. Gao Fei launched the Huawei ICT Talent Development Report in Kampala on Friday 27^th August 2021 at Kampala Serena Hotel.

Research shows that people and organizations’ ability to access and use ICT services is more likely to drive economic development than ICT education and skills.

Hon. Dr. Chris Baryomunsi who launched the ICT Talent development report and awarded the most Outstanding lecturer Mr. Olinga Peter John who trained the winners of the Huawei ICT Competition in 2020 both regional and global level.

He lauded initiatives such as the Huawei ICT Academy, Huawei ICT Competition, and Huawei Seeds for the future among others as helping to make Uganda realize its 2040 vision and 2014 National ICT Policy sooner since through initiatives such as these that involve skilling of young people, Uganda achieve socio-economic Development and be relevant in the new digital era.

The Minister of ICT and National Guidance said, “ICT is a critical part to Uganda’s socio-economic development and big enabler of job creation, business growth, innovation, export, and efficient public service delivery.”

Minister of ICT and National Guidance, Hon. Dr. Chris Baryomunsi awarding Mr. Olinga Peter John the outstanding lecturer in 2020 at the Huawei ICT Academy.

The ICT minister also revealed that Uganda wants to be the region’s top ICT-enabled country and to realise this digital transformation, young people should have the skills, passion, determination and support to develop and use their ICT skills to drive this country forward.

He added that Government needs partners in private sector such as Huawei, not only in implementing technology solutions, but more importantly in working together to build the skills in our current and future workforce.

“The NRM government has put digital upskilling as a top priority and this is witnessed in the Vision 2040. Which is, Uganda shall develop and improve its ICT capacity, building efforts by adopting globally-benchmarked, industry-rated skills assessments, and training and certification standards. These efforts will be coupled with international industry collaboration in testing and certification standards,” he said.

Huawei has been playing an active role in Uganda’s digital transformation through technological infrastructure and digital upskilling. This has been the case since 2007 when Huawei started its collaboration with the Ministry of ICT when the National Backbone infrastructure project commenced.

Huawei ICT Development Report 2021 launch was attended by the Deputy Prime Minister Rukia Nakaddama Isanga, Minister of Education – higher education Hon. Dr JC Muyingo, and Chinese embassy Representative (the economic and commercial counsellor) Mrs. Jiang Jiqing and the Huawei Southern Africa regional VP Mr. Frank Yang Chen among others.

Huawei Uganda has today announced a new free Artificial Intelligence (AI) study aimed at accelerating training and upskilling Uganda’s ICT professionals with the latest industry technologies.

The new Artificial Intelligence course is available at the Huawei Uganda ICT academy online website https://e.huawei.com/en/talent/#/news/details?consultationId=743  and classes shall begin today 22^nd February 2021 for all those interested to study.

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) course is an addition to the already existing Huawei professional certification path which includes on-demand ICT industry courses like Routing and Switching, Cloud computing, wireless, network security, Big Data, Data Communications, among others.

To date, Huawei has trained approximately 4,000 Ugandan ICT Professionals and certified over 1,300 under its ICT Academies hosted by Makerere, Kyambogo, Nkozi, Gulu, Muni, and Mbarara, among other universities.

Initial ICT Academy training on courses under the Huawei professional certification path started in 2019, and continued in 2020 with new virtual trainings due to the COVID19 Pandemic.

In 2021, the addition of AI under the Huawei Certified Network Associate (HCNA) path will upskill more ICT professionals with a detailed pool of course units necessary for deep learning.

The HCNA-AI course uses a mainstream TensorFlow framework and supports Keras (a high-level neural network API, and deep learning framework written in Python) widely used, powerful, and has excellent compatibility necessary for fast learning.

Learning material from the course involves basic mathematics and machine learning which will guide students to gradually understand all related techniques of deep learning such as, convolutional neural networks, cyclic neural networks, regularization and optimizers.

At a later point in the course, deep learning in application areas such as, computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing will be introduced to contextualize all AI use cases in the world.

Additionally, the HCNA-AI course provides a convenient platform with an anytime learning mode which allows students to set a custom learning pace.

More so, a free simulation environment can be accessed on an Elastic Cloud Server (ECS) hosted on the Huawei Public Cloud, and then installed according to the course manual to help students emulate real-world AI use cases.

The installed environment has a custom public IP address, username and password allowing students to login to the lab environment, and learn anytime from anywhere by simply having an active internet connection.

Also, the HCNA-AI program offers programming exercises which include an image recognition battle, a speech recognition contest, and human–machine dialogue so that students can easily emulate what they learn and implement them through real-world applications.

While unveiling the new HCNA-AI certification structure, Huawei Uganda’s Public Relations Director Gaojian noted that the AI engineering certification path offers fundamental knowledge and provides industry-specific applications that can be used in line with other technologies including 5G, Internet of Things (IOT), among others.

On why Huawei has introduced the HCNA-AI certification study in Uganda, Gaojian said that; “It is to train and certify engineers who can use algorithms, such as machine learning and deep learning algorithms, to design and develop AI products and solutions and make improvement through innovation. Such engineers are competent for sales, marketing, product manager, project management, technical support, and other AI positions.”

So, similar to all Huawei ICT Academy certification paths, HCNA-AI students will be able to participate in the annual Huawei ICT competition and the Huawei ICT Job Fair from where they can showcase their talents against the world’s best in national, regional and global rounds.

Henceforth, as Huawei aims at building a sound talent ecosystem by outputting high quality ICT talent to the ICT industry through its global certification paths, upskilled ICT professionals in the end continue to help in talent development and innovations bridging a new wave of Job creators against Job seekers in Uganda.

By Grapevine Reporter