…as over 10,000 students compete in ICT competition
The Federal Government has appealed to a Chinese leading Information Communication Technology (ICT) firm, Huawei, to further expand its undergraduate scholarship programmes to both Masters and Doctorate Degree for Nigerian students. Minister of Communications, Adebayo Shittu, who made the appeal during the Nigeria ICT Talents Development Summit and the 2018 Huawei ICT competition launch in Abuja, also urged the firm to ensure that the training offered to Nigerian students are job related.
Shittu, who noted that Nigerian students were among the most intelligent in the world, stressed the need for students to acquire ICT training that would enable them to take up roles as job creators and employers of labour, as well as to fast-track the development of Nigeria’s technologies.
The Minister said: “Sponsorship and training of our students should not be on short service. Huawei has the capacity to offer Masters and Doctorate scholarships such as the one we have been enjoying from their Koreans counterpart.
We hope that not less than 10 of our students will be availed the opportunities for Masters and Doctorate programmes. “We appreciate what Huawei has been doing in promoting Nigeria’s technological innovation, knowledge transfer and ICT infrastructure construction.
But, I still want to implore you to sustain this partnership so that more students will be trained and benefit from the programme.”
Meanwhile, the Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), Prof. Abubakar Rasheed, also urged Huawei to capture more universities in its scholarship and training programmes. Prof. Rasheed, who was represented by a Director in the Commission, Chris Miyaki, said: “We want more universities to benefit from this programme, as 13 universities currently benefiting from the training is not enough.
It reminds us of the urgent need for the industry and the academia to come together to solve societal challenges.” Responding, the Managing Director, Huawei Nigeria Enterprise, Mr. Tank Li, disclosed that over 10,000 students from 15 universities in Nigeria participated in the contest.
According to him, Huawei was committed to cultivate at least over 800,000 talents within the next five years in an open ecosystem that would “bring together hardware and software developers, cloud platform vendors, integrators and service providers, solution providers and even a large number of individual developers around the world.”
On his part, the Commercial Counselor of Chinese Embassy, Zhao Linxiang, noted that the competition was not only a great opportunity for Nigeria to cultivate and reserve enough ICT talents to cope with the ongoing global information revolution, but it would provide job orientation for Nigerian undergraduates.