UNESCO-Huawei partnered to provide Artificial Intelligence training for academic Institutions

The UNESCO Regional Office for East Africa has partnered with Huawei Technologies (Kenya) Co., LTD to train faculty members from universities and colleges that are in the early stages of career and eager to formulate and integrate AI into their teaching course as part of their courses in countries in the East Africa region.

Developing countries in East Africa will be able to reap the rewards of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and overcome the skills shortage that hinders their national innovation systems. Through this initiative, new out-of-the-box education and training techniques that value interdisciplinary skills and creative thinking, in order to produce a technically savvy and innovative workforce, have been developed in countries of ‘East Africa. They will also adopt what they have learned from this training in their curriculum to bring more young workers into new technologies. Similar Program is launched by Huawei for Pakistan in which Many University graduate took benefit out of it.

UNESCO Regional Office for East Africa and Huawei announced their collaboration to improve digital skills and the application of artificial intelligence (AI) at the HUAWEI CONNECT summit in Shanghai, China in 2019 Ann Therese Ndong-Jatta, Director of UNESCO’s Regional Office for East Africa announced the partnership during her speech at the Summit.

She stressed the importance of building digital skills in Africa and the tremendous opportunities offered by technology to improve the quality and accessibility of education: “I commend Huawei’s TECH4ALL initiative for focusing on technology in benefit people and launch this initiative to ensure that no one is left behind, especially those in the most remote areas. UNESCO East Africa is delighted to work with Huawei on this initiative. The current training program is the second in the series with the Huawei ICT Academy program under this cooperation agreement.

This training program is a one-week program with introduction to Python programming; Foundation of deep learning; image and speech recognition programming with human-machine dialogue programming. The morning sessions are devoted to theoretical sessions and those in the afternoon to online experiments. At the end of the training, there was an online certification exam, where successful trainees received Huawei HCIA-AI certification to become certified AI professionals.