A forum entitled “Accelerating Digital Education” held in Addis Ababa

Addis Ababa, March 29, 2024 (FBC) – Huawei’s annual Ethiopia Digital Week 2024-Huawei Education Forum is underway in Addis Ababa under the theme “Accelerating Digital Education” with the participation of several stakeholders.

Huawei Digital Africa Tour 2024 is a series of events newly launched to serve as a technology and innovation communication platform for ICT practitioners and industry insiders.

Dr. Samuel Kifle, Addis Ababa University president, in his opening remarks said that “digital transformation is an important direction of education transformation worldwide. Following the initiative “Digital Ethiopia 2025,” the Digital Strategy Country Action Plan (DSCAP) is being taken to use IT to promote education reform and improve education quality. We are fully aware of the importance of education digitalization and continuously pay attention to the construction of smart campuses and working in collaboration with companies like Huawei for better output.”

Dr. Rita Bissoonaut, Director of the UNESCO Liaison Office to the African Union and UNECA and Representative to Ethiopia, on the other hand, explained the benefits of digitalizing education, mentioning the UNESCO Huawei and MOE open school for all projects. She mentioned that UNESCO and Huawei have a long-standing partnership to support the promotion of youth in Africa through ICT, AI, big data cloud computing, and IoT. Huawei Education Summit 2024 is in alignment with UNESCO global and regional agendas. Dr. Rita also expressed that UNESCO works actively to bridge the digital gender divide and to empower women and girls by promoting gender equality in the development and use of digital technologies.

Rock Qin, Vice President of Huawei Northern Africa, also explained in his remarks that “Huawei shares the same vision to provide better education for children through cutting-edge technologies and education digitalization solutions, such as Virtual Human, U-learning, Code Arts, Wi-Fi 7 and Smart Classroom. We believe that the digital transformation of education is the best engine to accelerate it.”

Frank Huang, Director of Education and Healthcare Solutions, expressed in his part that Huawei shares the vision in common with all our education customers, which is to promote education equity and quality for all learners by providing leading technologies, including ICT infrastructure, cloud computing, AI, smart classrooms, etc., as well as ICT Academies in cooperation with universities globally for ICT talent cultivation.

Africa is reshaping itself as a new economic powerhouse by harnessing the power of digital transformation, and Huawei is accelerating. Huawei Digital Week 2024, which includes an education summit and a finance summit, is ongoing in Addis Ababa. The event had several panel discussions, presentations, and experience-sharing sessions aimed at accelerating digital education in Ethiopia.

In the afternoon’s session, Jimma University president Dr. Jemal Abafita, Raya University president Prof. Tadesse, Metu University acting president Dr. Bedilu Teka, and Axum University president Prof. Gebreyesus Tesfahunegn had a panel discussion focused on “Education Digitalization.” And the discussions were led by Huawei senior experts.  In addition, in the morning session, among others, Addis Ababa Science and Technology, Jimma, and Bahir Dar universities shared their experiences with education digitalization.

More than that, Huawei shared many cutting-edge technologies with all attendees, such as Wi-Fi 7, DCS Full-Stack Data Center Solution, etc., one of which is Digital Human, enabling many speakers to give speeches in Amharic and greatly expanding the capabilities of real education scenarios.

Huawei is actively engaged in numerous Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives to benefit Ethiopian students through digital technologies. These include the Seeds for the Future program, the Huawei ICT competition, the ICT Academy, DigiTruck Ethiopia, UNESCO, Huawei, and MOE Open School for all projects.

Founded in 1987, Huawei is a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. It has 207,000 employees and operating in more than 170 countries and regions, serving more than three billion people around the world.

Huawei’s vision and mission is to bring digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world. To this end, it will work towards ubiquitous connectivity and inclusive network access, laying the foundation for an intelligent world; provide diversified computing power where you need it, when you need it, to bring cloud and intelligence to all four corners of the earth; build digital platforms to help all industries and organizations become more agile, efficient, and dynamic; and redefine user experience with AI, making it smarter and more personalized for people in all aspects of their life, whether they’re at home, on the go, in the office, having fun, or working out.