UNESCO-Huawei Partnership Fosters Training on Artificial Intelligence Programming in Eastern Africa

We are living through what has been termed the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a fast-paced socio-economic transformation driven by rapid technological progress that is disrupting entire industries and governance systems. UNESCO position itself rapidly to ensure that it can provide all its Member States with the necessary foresight to take advantage of this technological revolution while ensuring respect for human dignity and security. Artificial intelligence holds great promise for building inclusive knowledge societies and helping countries reach their targets under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, but it also poses acute ethical challenges.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers 2018 survey of nearly 1,400 CEOs in 91 countries, many companies face ‘a shortage of skilled talent to clean, integrate and extract value from big data and move beyond baby steps toward AI’… It’s not only a matter of hiring or developing AI specialists and data scientists. It is equally important to cultivate a workforce ready to use AI based systems. In Asia-Pacific and Africa, as many as 35% and 45% of company CEOs respectively express ‘extreme concern’ about the availability of necessary skills. The current skills gap is preventing companies from embracing AI. Engineering has always had an essential role in development and human welfare. Ensuring that future generations of engineers and scientists will be able to design solutions for local and global challenges is critical. Artificial intelligence is now evolving at breakneck speed, thanks to increasingly powerful supercomputers. One might initially associate artificial intelligence and machine learning with robots and science fiction. However, it is, without question, seeping into our everyday lives through, for example, digital advertising, speech recognition tools and innovations. The breakthrough in AI is on an accelerated development path and has been further propelled by innovations in other frontier technologies, including cloud computing, big data, Internet of Things, and virtual reality. As a convergence of a widening spectrum of frontier technologies, AI has garnered the potential to bring new possibilities for global development and societal change.

Under this backdrop UNESCO Regional Office for Eastern Africa joined hands with Huawei Technologies (Kenya) Co., LTD to train university and college faculty members who are in the early carrier and willing to formulate and integrate AI into their teaching course as part of their regular course from Eastern Africa Regional countries. The developing countries in Eastern Africa will be able to reap the benefits of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and overcome the skills shortage that hamstrings their national innovation systems. Through this initiative a new, out-of-the box teaching and training techniques that value cross-disciplinary skills and creative thinking, in order to produce a technically savvy, innovative workforce has been developed in Eastern African countries. They will also adopt what they learned through this training into their teaching curriculum to bring more youth work force in new technology.

UNESCO Regional Office for Eastern Africa and Huawei announced their collaboration to enhance digital skills and the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at HUAWEI CONNECT Summit in Shanghai, China during 2019. Ann Therese Ndong-Jatta, Director for UNESCO Regional Office for Eastern Africa announced the partnership during her speech at the Summit. 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.” The current training programme is second in the series with Huawei ICT Academy program under this cooperation agreement.

This training programme is week-long (17-21 August 2020) programme with introduction to Python Programming; Propaedeutics of Deep Learning; image and speech Recognition Programming with Human-Machine Dialogue Programming. The morning sessions are devoted for theoretical and afternoon session are for online experiments.   At the end of the training, there was an online certification exam, where the trainees who successfully completed, received a Huawei HCIA-AI certification to become certified professionals in AI.