Huawei founder to grace Africa's digital awards in Kampala

The founder of the global technology giant Huawei will be presented with a medal of honour at the 3rd Digital Impact Awards Africa (DIAA2016) in Kampala later this August.

Ren Zhengfei, will receive "Africa's Digital Inclusion Medal of Honor" at the Kampala Serena Hotel on August 18th 2016.

The award according to organizers will be in appreciation of Zhengfei and Huawei's contribution to digital Inclusion in Africa.

"They have enabled the "mobile revolution," Africa's mobile technology would not be as far along as it is without Huawei and its well-priced products and services," noted Innocent Kawooya, chief executive of HiPipo, the organizers of the awards.

Kawooya said the DIAA2016 jury found it noble to award and honor Zhengfei whose strategic leadership of the global technology giant Huawei has been key to the benefits Africa has gained from Huawei products and services.

The awards and lectures will run under the theme "Maximizing the Digital Dividend".

"We believe in the transformative capacity of technology-based solutions. The focus is on digital inclusion, financial inclusion and cybersecurity," noted Kawooya adding that 21 awards categories will be competed for.

The awards categories include applications, digital financial services awards. Under the financial services awards, service providers will be assessed for their impact and quality of service in covering mobile money, remittance services, digital payments, online/mobile banking and financial inclusion.  The others are best cybersecurity practice which encourages organizations to treat cybersecurity as a business necessity.

Huawei Technologies is Chinese multinational networking and telecommunications equipment. Since the late 1990s, Huawei has been making phones and communication equipment which has boosted Africa uptake of technology largely because of competitive pricing, tailor-made for African countries.

In Uganda, Huawei is laying the fibre optic cable under the national backbone infrastructure project and e-government project

Founded in 1987 by Zhengfei, an ex-military officer, Huawei today has about 140,000 employees in over 140 countries. About 46% of the employees are involved in research & development signifying the importance the company attaches to research. By the year 2010, 80% of the top 50 telecom companies worked with Huawei and the firm is the largest telecom equipment maker in the world.

Over the last 15 years, nearly every African country has partnered with Huawei in some form either for network infrastructure deployment or devices distribution. Hundreds of thousands of Huawei devices have extended digital inclusion to Africa while at the same time different mobile operators are relying on Huawei equipment and platforms to deliver digital services.