At HUAWEI CONNECT, UNESCO Regional Office for Eastern Africa and Huawei announced they would collaborate to enhance digital skills and the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to contribute to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which is an integral part to the program of equaling quality education in Huawei’s digital inclusion initiative TECH4ALL.
Ann Therese Ndong-Jatta, Director for UNESCO Regional Office for Eastern Africa announced the partnership during her speech at the TECH4ALL Summit at Huawei Connect in Shanghai. During her speech she emphasized the importance for building digital skills in Africa and the tremendous opportunities for technology to improve education quality and accessibility: “I commend Huawei’s TECH4ALL initiative for focusing on technology to benefit people, and launching this initiative to make sure no-one is left behind, especially those in the most remote areas. UNESCO East Africa is excited to work with Huawei together on this initiative.”
Tao Jingwen, Board Member and Chairman of the CSD (Corporate Sustainable Development) Committee at Huawei, expressed Huawei’s strong commitment to TECH4ALL stating: “Huawei is not only fully committed to this initiative but recognizes the importance of collaboration with partners in order to implement this ambitious program and achieve wide-scale and sustainable impact. UNESCO is an excellent partner for us, not only in expanding digital skills to those in remote areas but also in the use of technology to improve education where they have extensive experience and expertise. We are delighted to be working with them and hope to expand the relationship in the future.”
The partnership between UNESCO East Africa and Huawei will focus on six areas:
- Assist in enhancing Digital Skills amongst teachers through the use of Huawei’s DigiTruck to teach teachers to use digital technologies, integrate ICT into teaching, and to teach students how to use digital technologies.
- Organize forums and events to enhance member states capacity on the use of AI.
- Coordinate efforts to improve digital skills amongst youth leveraging on Huawei’s ICT Academy program, Huawei ICT Competition and Huawei Campus Ambassador Program.
- Promote the adoption of AI and Cloud Computing in Education by offering cutting edge ICT training in areas of AI and Cloud Computing to more institutions of learning, teachers and students in Eastern Africa and their use to achieve the SDGs.
- Collaborate in research on Digital Skills to improve knowledge on the state of digital skills in Eastern Africa.
- Promote the importance of Digital Skill by engaging with their respective stakeholders.
Under this collaboration, the first training for University Lecturers in Kenya on AI has already taken place and later this year those lecturers will begin offering Huawei certified AI training courses to their students through the Huawei ICT Academy program.
The DigiTruck will start operations this month working with UNESCO and other partners enabling teachers to use technology in their teaching, youth to learn and gain employment online, and those who have never used the internet or smartphones before to gain digital literacy skills.
HUAWEI CONNECT is an annual flagship event hosted by Huawei for the global ICT industry, and this year is being held in Shanghai from September 18 to 20, 2019. This year’s conference is themed around “Advance Intelligence” and aims to establish an open, cooperative, and shared platform for customers and partners to explore new opportunities for an intelligent future
