Huawei South Africa wants to see a local team win the company’s prestigious annual Global ICT Competition to be held in China next year, and it is pulling out all the stops to make this happen.
The Huawei ICT Competition is one of the largest ICT events in the world, with the last one attracting 80 000 students from across the world, including 28 000 from Sub-Saharan Africa. It is aimed at driving the development of ICT talent for industry growth and digital transformation and is a crucial element of Huawei’s talent ecosystem, which seeks to address the skills shortage in the sector.
“In South Africa, we have set an ambitious target of registering 10 000 students for the national phase,” said Huawei ICT Talent Development Manager Tsholofelo Llale. “We are excited to report that we have already registered 7 000 students from 20 SA universities and colleges.”
Topics that will be covered in the competition include 4IR technologies like cloud computing, artificial intelligence, 5G mobile networks and big data.
To raise awareness of the competition, Huawei has conducted roadshows throughout the country at leading universities, TVET and private colleges and other tertiary institutions over the past few months. Llale says students participated in these roadshows with utmost enthusiasm and energy.
Huawei encourages ICT students who want a shot at competing in China next year to register by October 20th. Information can be found on the Huawei ICT Competition Southern Africa page at or by emailing Ictacademy27@huawei.com
In the next phase of the competition, students will write a preliminary exam (in the network or cloud track). From there, the top 100 students will move onto the national final stage, where they will attend boot camp training in their selected fields and then write a lab exam.
At the national final, Huawei will select the top six students (two teams from two institutions) who will participate in the Sub-Saharan regional phase of the competition.
“These students will be trained by our expert engineers to help them prepare for the regional final in February 2020,” said Llale. “Our goal is to ensure that they take the first prize in the regional final and represent Southern Africa in the international final in China in May 2020.”
