Seeds for the Future: Initiative to nurture young ICT professionals
Sponsored by Huawei
Group photo of participants during the opening ceremony of the June 2024 Seeds of Digital Exploration conference in Shenzhen, China.
Seeds for the Future programme is a global CSR initiative that Huawei launched in Thailand in 2008. In Kenya, we launched the Seeds for the Future programme in 2014 together with the ICT Authority to encourage university students to participate.
From 2014 up until the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the programme involved students getting internship at Huawei for a period of two months, and then travel to China for two weeks for an onsite training and to experience the Chinese culture.
During the pandemic period – from 2020 until 2023 – we had the programme fully shift to being an online engagement. Participants had to go through a one-week online training on the various Huawei ICT courses, and have a virtual tour of China and its culture. In this arrangement, we increased the number of the students we were training from 10 in the pre-Covid-19 era to 60 for each of the years the programme took place virtually.
This year, the programme goes back to being a physical engagement. We will have the students go through a live training on cloud service and get certified to become Huawei ICT Associate.
After the live class, the students will have the opportunity to visit some of the ICT training centres in Nairobi, the Confucius Institute, and so much more.
The programme will then enable the participants to visit China in September for a tour and to further be trained on most of the ICT courses that Huawei offers. To date, more than 300 students have benefitted from the initiative.
Kenyan team that visited China (Shenzhen and Shanghai) this year under the Huawei Seeds of the Future programme.
As part of the Seeds for the Future programme, we introduced the Global Tech4Good competition, which is an entrepreneurship event designed to help young adults learn about the latest trends in digitalisation and explore how digital technologies can address common social issues.
Global Tech4Good aims to raise students’ awareness about the challenges to local sustainable development, support them to use the ICT skills they learn to explore solutions that are both technically and commercially viable, and help them turn their dreams into reality by:
- Intensive training and monthly workshop
- T4G Global Competition
- Incentive support to encourage winning teams to achieve business success for unique ideas
The Global ambassador programme was also introduced and all the Seeds for the Future alumni are eligible to vie for the position. In 2024, Danton Kipkurui, a Seeds for the Future alumni, vied and was successfully voted in as one of the 10 Global ambassadors. Through this, he was able to secure a trip to Shenzhen and Shanghai in China for himself and three other Seeds for the Future alumni, who were able to tour the two cities, attend the Mobile World Congress in Shanghai, as well as the LEAP summit.
