Uganda was heavily represented in the Huawei Global ICT Competition Sub Saharan Africa by students from both Makerere University and Muni University, which took twelve and three representatives respectively.
In the results that were announced yesterday, three students from Makerere took first position and then the other six from Makerere and Muni took second position respectively.
The nine month long Huawei ICT competition for Sub Saharan Africa was finalized on 9th February, with at least 16 countries and 38 teams themed “Connection, Glory, Future.”
The competition was launched in the African region just six years ago but has developed into the largest ICT skills competition in Africa and the world at large, the latest attracting over 15,000 participants from Sub Saharan Africa from 500 universities and over 150,000 on a global scale.
The representatives of Uganda shall now proceed to the global finals in China to compete at global level in May this year.
The Huawei Uganda Public Relations Director, Mr Gaojian, the Huawei campaign extended to over 15 universities and attracted over 750 students to participate in the contest.
“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”, he said
One of the winners and a telecom engineer at Makerere University, Michelle Chemutai expressed her gratitude for the exposure that Huawei had given them through this contest.
“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.
In addition, she revealed that this competition was a new experience that taught her team work and coordination.
“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.” She said
Through revolutionary movements like these, Huawei hopes to skill up more than 700,000 ICT professionals in Sub Saharan Africa by 2023