University student leads Uganda team to global ICT final competition

Nov 01, 2020

Doreen Nalwoga, a computer science student together with, Shafik Nyanzi and Emmanuel Kiguli, will represent Uganda at the Huawei Global ICT Competition in November.

A female student from Lira University is leading a team of three university students from Uganda to contest in the final Information and Communication Technology Competition to be held in China.

Doreen Nalwoga, a computer science student together with, Shafik Nyanzi and Emmanuel Kiguli, will represent Uganda at the Huawei Global ICT Competition in November.

Nyanzi and Kiguli are computer science students from Muni University in Arua District.

From November 6 to 8, the 13 Sub-Saharan African teams will attend the Global Final online. There will be over 300 competitors.

The students participated in the Huawei Information and Communication Technology Competition 2019-2020. The award ceremony took place at the Kampala Serena Hotel.

They were among many students from Uganda and other African countries that participated in the competition.

Students from Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa qualified in the Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa ICT Competition. They will join other competitors from other continents in the final competitions.

Under the theme of "Connection, Glory, Future", the four day competitions kicked off on September 10, 2020. 

Under the competitions, under-graduates access learning material free of charge on the Huawei online learning platform in various courses such as network security, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, security, data and storage.

They are tested at regional, national and Africa level as the competition progresses.

For sailing to the top in Africa, the students got certificates, trophies, smart phones as prizes. They will be flown to China in November for the final global competitions.

Nalwoga said they had have attained professional certification at no cost and received awards.

"I am capable of designing, implementing and maintaining business enterprise networks now," Doreen said.

While meeting the students recently the permanent secretary at the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance, Vincent Waiswa Bagiire, said there are about 30 universities in Uganda, churning out many ICT graduates.

"We feel those graduates can benefit by participating in international ICT competitions. They should get as many skills as possible. Uganda has many talented ICT graduates, soft- ware engineers working in global companies.

We hope the ICT graduates can become the majority employed in Uganda's telecommunications and ICT companies," Bagiire said.

Bagiire said he was happy that the three university students from Uganda that emerged winners in Africa were from universities outside Kampala City and Mukono district.

He said ICT skills were needed in other regions of Uganda.

About 50,000 university students from 14 African countries participated in the competition that started in September.

The Managing Director of Huawei Uganda, Gao Fei, said that the training contents in the program have been aligned with skills requirements in the job market.

 "We dedicate ourselves to working with universities across the country to 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," Gao Fei said.

Hou Tao, Global Vice President of Huawei, noted the impressive enthusiasm of the students. Tao said this is much needed for Africa's digital inclusion in the era when the gravity of workplace skills is already shifting online.


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