Translations

Seeds for the Future: HUAWEI Technologies’ community involvement through ICT education in Kenya

7. Community involvement

Education

Sector Telecommunication, Medias, ITC

Year 2011

Country Kenya

Transmitter

Context

Huawei is a chinese leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, specialized in telecom networks, devices and cloud computing. Their products and solutions have been deployed in over 140 countries and have served 45 of the world's top 50 telecom operators, as well as one third of the world's population.

Huawei wants to promote the knowledge and competences transmission using the Information and the Communication Technology (ICT), and to make stakeholders beneficiate from their Telco expertise. Especially in Kenya, there is a lack of qualified engineers, and that can impede the development of the ICT industry. This brought Huawei to launch the "Telecom Seeds for the Future" project in Kenya in June 2011.

Objectives

- The main challenge is to provide up to date ICT trainings to students, as there is a gap between what is learned in class and what is happening in the industry.

- Huawei aims at promoting also local innovation and entrepreneurship with the development of applications to facilitate the daily challenges of Kenyans.

APPROACH

Within the program, Huawei donates some data communications equipments, makes its training center available for the students, and accompanies them in their professional development by offering internships positions in the company. The program includes also Universities curriculum review and competition for Android applications development to enhance localized innovation.

In Kenya, Huawei signed a partnership with three local universities (Moi, JKUAT and Nairobi Universities) and with Safaricom Ltd, an integrated communications company, to implement this project. Up to 45 students from those 3 universities enter the one-year program.

Students benefit from advanced training in latest telecommunication technologies through their East Africa state-of-the-art training centre situated in Mombasa. The training centre is located on 3 floors: 2 of the floors hold equipment while one floor is used for training. It can hold a maximum of between 40 to 80 students at a time. The centre is equipped with 10 trainers.

Besides this program, Huawei offers about 40 internships every year (2 months in average, some of them being extended)

CONTRIBUTION TO COMPANY PERFORMANCE

The project sustains the success of Huawei’s IDEOS smartphone, leader on the Kenyan smartphone market with a 45% share, because it is crucial in promoting localized software applications and Huawei wants to leverage on this asset.

Benefits

Huawei bridges the digital divide, and supports education in universities and local entrepreneurship through the development of dedicated applications for smartphones.

Huawei therefore contributes to Kenya’s Vision 2030 and helps the Telco industry be sustainable by training qualified engineers.