Huawei moves to boost ICT literacy
Pauline Dikuelo | Friday September 18, 2015 15:03
Through an agreement that it signed with the Southern African Telecommunications Association (SATA) in Gaborone this week, the company seeks to help develop the social-economy in Africa by expediting the digital transformation in the region.
The agreement was signed at the opening SATA’s second regional customer services, quality services and billing conference.
The agreement makes Huawei and SATA partners in the information and communications technology to coordinate the development of networks and services in support of the socio-economic development programmes for SADC.
“Our vision is to facilitate the building of a prosperous information society for the SADC region,” SATA’s executive secretary, Jacob Munodawafa said. “ICT development will drive tremendous transformation in different industries, and we are looking for partners that can work with us. Huawei, as an active role and an ICT leader in more than 170 countries, must have a lot of global experience to share.”
Munodawafa said he appreciated the efforts that Huawei made in ICT knowledge transfer and that he was happy to have Huawei as a strategic partner to shape SADC’s ICT future.
Yang Hongjie, the marketing director of Huawei Eastern an Southern Africa, added: “Huawei is solidifying efforts over the years with our partners on all fronts because we believe that ICT technologies are reshaping Africa and other parts of the world, and leading the next wave of sustainable social development. With over 17 years of experience within Africa’s ICT industry coupled with our extensive industry global network, Huawei is committed to building a better connected Africa.”
After entering Africa in 1998, Huawei has been partnering with local operators to provide innovative ICT solutions and services, striving to engineer broadband technology to the highest standard, faster than ever, for everyone, everywhere.
Huawei also leverages its global training resources to cultivate ICT talents for Africa. Its seven ICT training centres in Africa have trained more than 30,000 people and it is also working closely with governments and top tier universities to send African students back to China to have ICT training and hands-on working experience with advanced ICT equipment.
The public communications manager for Huawei Botswana, Cyril Xu said the ‘Seeds for the Future’ ICT training programme will be initiated in Botswana this year to cultivate talent.
Opening the SATA conference, the managing director of Botswana Telecommunications Corporation Limited (BTCL), Paul Taylor said his company was undertaking a transformational programme of accelerating change aimed at customer satisfaction.
“We are engaging in customer service related training and development that is aligned to the BTCL business and investing heavily in much greater levels of system rationalisation and process automation,” he said. A 2014/15 BTCL customer satisfaction survey indicated that the parastatal was improving its customer service.
“We see short term growth in our mobile and broadband business areas with mid term sustainable growth coming from converged offers,” he said.