Investing in Digital skills to Unlock Uganda’s Digital Growth Potential

Mr. Liu Jiawei , Huawei Uganda MD

President Museveni has severally emphasized that it is important that Ugandans take vocational skills serious. Indeed last week he offered the same advice to over 8,480 graduands, who had attained training in vocational skills, urging the group, which was mostly composed of young women, to use attained skills to better their lives.

The graduands, who had been trained under the ‘Presidential Initiative on Skilling the Girl Child between July and December 2018, attained skills in bakery, hair dressing, knitting, tailoring and shoemaking.

Apart from the skills above, the young women also attained lifetime skills in Information and Communication Technology ICT, which have become a necessity in a highly driven IT era.

It is anticipated that the skills gap across all industries will widen in the Fourth Industrial Revolution globally. Therefore, the young women are in poll position to reap from IT skills they attained.

According to the World Economic Forum, at least 133 million new roles generated as a result of the new division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms, may emerge globally by 2022.

By then, 85 per cent of companies across the world will have to expand their adoption of technologies such as data analytics, internet of things and cloud computing.

In Uganda, the ICT skills gap is also a challenge given that the country has in the past 10 years witnessed a tremendous upsurge of ICTs.

The ICT sector has grown 19.7 per cent on average each year since 2013, adding 2.5 per cent annually to Uganda’s GDP.

In 2017, Uganda advanced five places in the International Telecommunication Union’s ICT Development Index, placing it 20th in Africa and second within East Africa.

However, a report by National Information Technology Authority shows that within MDAs in Uganda, ICT personnel account for only 1.9 per cent of the total work force.

Therefore, the great array of hope in Uganda’s ICT Sector and the capacity of ICT to create jobs, creates a need to invest in digital skills for a readily skilled ICT talent base for sectorial, industrial and national development.

Bridging the digital skill gap mainly focuses on three aspects: digital up-skilling and reskilling to strengthen capacity for institutions and ICT professionals, encourage and enable youth to improve ICT-related studies and enhance their digital skills and equip young people with basic digital skills to enable them consume content and ideas produced by others.

The factors above will enable a shift from theoretical to practical learning as well as allow innovation for jobs creating and entrepreneurship.

Skilling people is a major aspect, which, as ICT and National Guidance Minister Frank Tumwebaze says, will enable the country to shape, nurture and incubate young people that have the capability to build tailored products that not only solve problems but also bring them an income.

To achieve this, there is need for strong public-social-private partnership to prepare for a rapidly changing world in which the digital skills gap will be widening.

On one hand, policies that support more available, accessible and affordable digital infrastructure, especially to those in rural areas, must be established.

This will allow more equitable access to knowledge and harness technology to enable lifelong learning.

Decision makers need to direct more resources to strengthen institutional capacity building as well as enhancing digital competencies of teachers to scale their capabilities.

On the other hand, civil society and the private sector must focus on bridging formal and non-formal digital skills provision as well as create contextualized-specific planning by looking closely at the new requirements and the latest trends emerging in job market.

At Huawei, we believe that people are the most important asset. Therefore, investing in them is investment in the future.

This has been the basis that has informed Huawei’s introducing of upskilling and ICT talent development initiatives to bridge the gap between Academia and the ICT industry.

Such initiatives seek to build an ICT talent alliance, set an ICT talent standard and make Ugandans more employable.

Through the global ICT Competition that started in 2018 in Uganda, Huawei has had over 1,300 students accessing its learning platforms freely to access material on Networking, WLAN, and Cloud Computing.

Three top students were recently selected to represent Uganda in the regional final in South Africa. Uganda emerged third place out of 12 countries that participated.

This year we are seeking to reach over 6,000 university students countrywide.

Huawei has so far awarded 20 job opportunities to the top performers in the competition, and is still considering more who are about to finish their university.

The Huawei Seeds for the Future’ programme is another initiative where we take 10 university students every year to China for hands-on training at our headquarters in Beijing and Shenzhen.

Since 2016 we have so far taken 40 students of which 22 are already employed at Huawei and other organisation and the remaining still studying in their various universities.

The target is to train over 1000 students in Uganda by the end of 2020 through our ICT academies and certification programmes currently established in Makerere, Kyambogo, Kabale and Soroti universities, among others.

We also work closely with different ministries to support young innovators in the country and empower vulnerable groups.

I heard an inspiring story that a girl who is a beneficiary of one of the initiatives established a technology start-up to build a verified voucher system for simplifying the distribution of International and National aid.

Her skill acquisition and application could be properly described as “ICT for Development”, which is the name of the initiative.

ICTs are critical to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, and digital skill are critical to ICTs adoption and application. Tech is for good, with the right skill, we could pass it on. Huawei Uganda is willing and ready to invest with all its partners in digital skills in order to unlock Uganda’s digital growth potential for more inclusive development with no one left behind.