SHENZHEN, CHINA: Ten Botswana ICT students left here last week an empowered lot after undergoing a five-day training session on the latest telecommucations technology.
Sponsored by Huawei, the training programme, saw the University of Botswana (UB) students, including their counterparts from Indonesia and Serbia, receive mentoring in 3G, LTE 4G, E-PON and Cloud Computing among others.
Speaking at the closing ceremony to mark the end of the training, a representative of the students, Molly Kgobathe said the Huawei training had been a refreshing experience for the students.
“We have learnt a lot about Huawei technologies. It is our intention to fully utilise what we have learnt here and integrate it in our studies and work experiences when we go back home,” said the Master of Science in Information Systems student.
This was the first year that Botswana has benefitted from ‘Seeds for the future’ programme, which is part of the Huawei Corporate Social Investment.
Next year, Huawei Botswana plans to extend the training programme to other local universities. In an interview, a fourth year student in Computing and Finance, Letlhogonolo Motlhalamme, said the training on Huawei’s different infrastructure system was an eye-opener for him and hopes to use some of the experiences to advance his ambitions of becoming a data analyst. Huawei says it will also get feedback on the training and use it to improve the programme next year and beyond.
“The training was in response to observations that there seems to be a gap between the theory the students are taught in schools and what the industry demands.
“This year was only a pilot programme, we hope to engage more local universities next year and also look to increase the timeframe of the training programme. We also hope to incorporate the feedback from the students to help improve the quality of the training,” said Huawei’s public relations and government affairs manager, Cyril Xu Liang.
Before the training at Huawei Headquarters in Shenzhen, Huawei took the Botswana delegation through a five-day training session on the Chinese culture and language in the country’s capital, Beijing. Huawei, which operates in 170 countries worldwide employing 170,000 people, has been operating in Botswana since 1998 mainly involved in the carrier network business.
In recent years, Huawei’s enterprise business and consumer business have witnessed extraordinary growth.
In 2014, its carrier business grew by 15 percent; enterprise business grew by 27 percent and consumer business by 32 percent. Total revenue in 2014 was registered at $46.5 billion. In 2014, the main drivers of the growth in carrier business were a steady increase in 3G investments and the jump in 4G investments across the globe.
The company hopes to launch 4.5 technology by 2016 and 5G by 2020.
