Huawei South Africa has won the prestigious Digital Innovator Award at the State IT Agency’s (SITA) Digital Public Service Awards ceremony which took place in Durban, South Africa.
The event was attended by Minister Khumbudzo Ntshavheni and Deputy Minister Philly Mapulane of South Africa’s Department of Communications and Digital Technologies, as well as industry CEOs, government ministers from four African countries, and officials from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).
(TOP: Huawei South Africa CEO, Spawn Fan receiving the Digital Innovator Award from Broadband Infraco non-executive director, Zandi Kabini).
The 14th Annual GovTech Conference, themed ‘Reshaping the citizen experience through enhanced service delivery’, is the leading South African ICT event focusing on public sector ICT service delivery. The Conference brings the Government and ICT industry together to connect, learn, share, and collaborate. The highlight of the conference was the SITA Digital Public Service Awards gala dinner where the annual public service awardees were recognised for excellence in their use of technology in South Africa’s public service.
The Digital Innovator Award won by Huawei, recognises outstanding innovation and IT product development in the ICT Sector. The award recognises Huawei’s new methods, ideas and products that have accelerated digital transformation in South Africa. It also recognises Huawei for having supported IT innovation skills in the sector.
At the awards gala dinner, Huawei South Africa CEO Spawn Fan outlined how digital technologies can stimulate economic development and improve service delivery.
“In Huawei’s view, connectivity and computing are the cornerstones of the digital economy,” he said. “The convergence of connectivity and computing will change industries and government, in critical areas like education, and healthcare to create new value for society.”
He also outlined Huawei’s efforts to support innovation, not just as a hardware and solution provider, but as an investor in the entire ICT ecosystem. This includes a commitment to industry partnerships, supporting SMMEs and building and retaining an ICT talent pipeline for South Africa.
“Digitalisation is never achieved overnight,” Fan concluded. “A large number of technology enterprises are required to participate and a wide range of ICT talents are required to support the sustainable development of digitalisation.”
Huawei’s achievements:
Earlier this year, Huawei launched a joint-innovation lab at SITA, which aims to support ICT talent and to grow small, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) in the sector. On the education front, it works with partners in government, business and academia to run an ICT talent programme, which aims to train 10 000 South Africans per year in the latest technologies of 5G, Cloud, and AI. This programme covers universities and TVET students studying ICT and people already working in the sector.
To further support startup SMMEs, the company recently announced the Huawei Spark Programme at Huawei Eco-connect 2022. This will see Huawei Cloud invest R100 million, to enable 1 000 local startups to develop their capabilities.
To ensure its commitment to digital literacy and reducing education inequality, Huawei has worked with local partners to launch the Digischool project under Huawei’s global TECH4ALL initiative in South Africa. The project aims to connect 100 rural schools and benefit 50,000 students.
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