• At MWC Shanghai 2024 last month, Huawei announced that it plans to train 150 000 people in Sub-Saharan Africa over the next three years.
• This is on top of the company’s current objective of 100 000 people by 2025.
• Huawei says it has already surpassed its 2025 objective by training 120 percent of the initial goal number.

This week Huawei held its Africa Connect 2024 conference in Johannesburg, where parts of the company’s opening keynote focused on local talent development. This has been key focus for the company in recent years, and at MWC Shanghai 2024 a couple of weeks ago, Huawei outlined some new objectives in terms of local talent development.

To that end, it announced that it plans to train 150 000 people in the Sub-Saharan Africa region over the next three years. The focus here is on fostering more critical ICT skills, exposing trainees to real-world industries, and ultimately improve their prospects of employment, which as we know is a particularly significant issue here in South Africa.

Huawei also provided an update on its current local talent initiative, which outlined training 100 000 people by 2025. Here the company has already surpassed the target, with more than 120 000 people already trained over the past 26 months.

The latest target of 150 000 therefore seems more than achievable for Huawei.

Both announcements were made at the LEAP Summit 2024: ICT Talent and Sustainable Development for Sub-Saharan Africa at MWC Shanghai.

“Huawei launched the LEAP Digital Talent Development Program in Sub-Saharan Africa since 2022. After more than two years of development, we are glad to see that so many people have benefited from it,” noted Jeff Wang (pictured above), SVP and president of Public Affairs and Communications at Huawei.

For those unfamiliar, LEAP (Leadership, Employability, Advancement and Possibilities) is Huawei’s digital skills development program specifically for Sub-Saharan Africa.

The program aims to foster a strong digital leadership and skilled ICT workforce, build a digital talent pool and promote digital literacy among citizens, and includes a wide range of activities from ICT training and certification courses to government digital capacity building and ICT skills competitions.

One of the more recent elements added to LEAP is the Digital Badge program, which enables students and teachers who have attended Huawei ICT Academy programs to display these certifications on their social media platforms and use them to leverage future employment opportunities.

“Digital skills development and access to ICT is not about ICT, it’s about people. It’s about empowering people to participate sufficiently in the digital economy,” added John OMO, secretary general of the African Telecommunications Union (ATU), which co-hosted the LEAP Summit 2024.

While we are yet to see what initiatives will form part of the latest talent push for South Africa, Huawei is currently calling for applicants to its Seeds for the Future program. Applications close on 31st July 2024.

[Images – Provided]