This week Huawei South Africa held its ICT Academy prize giving ceremony, celebrating some of the milestones achieved through the programme and acknowledging the top performing institutions and instructors for the first half of 2021.
For those unfamiliar with the ICT Academy, it is a non-profit partnership program that authorises universities and colleges to deliver Huawei Certification courses to their students.
“This programme acts as a bridge between enterprises and academia to build a talent ecosystem for the ICT industry. It has been designed to deliver standard professional certification required by employers,” Huawei SA explains.
Since the launch of the programme, more than 60 academic institutions, 40 of which are from the TVET sector, have enrolled across all nine provinces in the country. To date more than 4 000 students and lecturers have participated in Huawei ICT certification training, with 2 000-plus students successfully obtaining a certificate.
“These outstanding achievements are measured against a very difficult period of the pandemic, which makes it all the more important to celebrate and acknowledge,” noted Kian Chen, deputy CEO at Huawei South Africa.
“Let me take this opportunity to commend the Huawei ICT Academy for the sterling work it has been doing with South African colleges and universities, in training young people in such critical technical areas as Routing and Switching, WLAN, Security, Cloud Computing, Storage, Big Data, IOT and Artificial Intelligence,” added Buti Kgwaridi Manamela (pictured in header), Deputy Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, who was in attendance at the ceremony.
As for the winners announced on the day, the following institutions and instructors were recognised:
Top Huawei ICT Academies:
- The Graduate Institute of South Africa
- Tshwane South TVET College
- University of Venda
Top Huawei ICT Academy Instructor:
1. Sibusiso Shabalala, Special Projects supervisor / Huawei ICT Academy instructor – The Graduate Institute of South Africa
2. Peter Letsoalo, Lecturer / Huawei ICT Academy instructor – Tshwane South TVET College
3. Thabani Njaba, ICT Training officer and Huawei ICT Academy instructor – University of Venda
With there being a greater need to develop ICT skills locally, here’s hoping Huawei has more initiatives like the ICT Academy and recent Job Fair in the works.
