KAMPALA – Three Makerere University Students have been chosen to represent Uganda in the Huawei ICT global competition which is at its regional final stage in South Africa. These top three students who were chosen on merit excelled in the preliminary and national final exams of the competition which was carried between October and December 2019.
This is the second edition of the Huawei ICT Competition in Uganda with over 2500 students who registered to participate and out of those 100 excelled to the national final exam.
With the theme “Connection, Glory, Future”, 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.
The 2500 competition participants from Makerere, Kyambogo, Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Nkozi, Mbarara, Kabale, Lira, Gulu, Muni, UCU and MUBS accessed learning material free of charge on the Huawei online learning platform in the various courses such as Network and Cloud track. The networking 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. These are Magola Kenneth, Okello Stephen and Mudulo Gerald.
These are expected to go to South Africa on 22nd March 2020 to participate in the regional final with other African countries and later in May to China, Shenzhen in the global final amongst the rest of the world.
Mr. Liaoshuangquan, the Huawei Uganda Human Resource Director noted 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.
“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 Mr. Liaoshuangquan.
The second edition of this skilling competition began in October 2019 with several roadshows in the earlier mentioned universities and also a boot camp training to prepare the competition participants to do the exams.
Mr. Liaoshuangquan, The Huawei Human Resource Director continued to note that the top 11 students among the 100 national finalists shall be awarded in a ceremony to happen in March, with Huawei Professional certificates, Huawei gift devices and job/internship opportunities at Huawei.
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 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 Makerere, MUBS, Soroti, Muni, Nkozi, Mbarara and Kabale University.