HAINA creates employability, entrepreneurship in ICT
Nnasaretha Kgamanyane | Friday April 13, 2018 13:42
Speaking during the HAINA launch in Gaborone recently, Professor Frank Youngman said the launch marked an important day for tertiary education in the country as it marked the formal beginning of a partnership between Huawei Technologies Botswana and the Botswana Open University (BOU).
“Last month, the Chancellor of BOU, Dr Ponatshego Kedikilwe said in his inaugural acceptance speech that there was need for tertiary institutions to maintain balance between the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and the need to provide relevant programmes for employability and entrepreneurship. I believe that the specialised academy we are launching today will certainly enhance BOU’s contribution to employability and entrepreneurship by training industry-certified professionals for the ICT sector,” he said.
He explained that the academy would also demonstrate the capacity of open and distance learning to provide training in technical skills that are useful to the economy. He added that Huawei is a global leader in the ICT industry and therefore they are impressed with their corporate vision of a digital society characterised by ubiquitous connectivity and their commitment to smart education, which harness technology for student- centred learning.
Youngman emphasised that the Huawei vision coincided with BOU’s vision as a digital flagship in the education sector providing blended learning based on online instruction supported by face-to-face teaching. He said the establishment of the HAINA at BOU would enable the university to address that problem.
“HAINA will deliver industry standard training programmes leading to Huawei certification for different career levels and specialisations. I expect HAINA to contribute to the curriculum of formal degree courses and also to provide stand-alone short courses,” he said, as he encouraged local ICT companies and service providers to take advantage of the opportunity to train their personnel in various technical skills available through the academy.
According to a representative from Huawei, Lu Guangli the digital era is coming and ICT technology plays a more fundamental role in every aspect of the industry.
“It is expected that by 2025, the number of global connections will reach 100 billion, five times more than in 2015. One hundred percent of enterprises will be connected to cloud services, and 85% of enterprise applications will be deployed in the cloud. To cope with this digital transformation, Huawei is actively building a New ICT industry ecosystem.”
“It will be an open ecosystem that will bring together a wide range of hardware and software developers, cloud platform vendors, integrators and service providers, solutions providers, and even a large number of individual developers around the world. We expect that in the next five years, the ICT ecosystem by Huawei will generate a demand for talent exceeding 800,000,” he said.
He explained that in order to meet that challenge, Huawei would continue to invest in building a talent eco-system (or ecological environment). Lu said they released Huawei Certification, the industry’s most comprehensive ICT certification system. He added that Huawei HCIE certificates have become very influential and recognised within the industry.
Huawei also has two Channel Partner programmes for ICT talent cultivation, Huawei Learning Partner for professional engineers and Huawei Academy Partner for academic students. They work as two strong engines to supply with qualified ICT talent in different levels.
Through the Huawei ICT Academy programme, Lu said they would continue to increase cooperation with other educational institutions. At present, he said there were more than 300 Huawei ICT academies worldwide, 25 of them based in Europe with more than 10,000 students having been trained every year.