Accra-Ghana, Nov. 18, GNA – Mr Leo Chen, President of Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Region said Huawei was supporting Africa in advancing the technical revolution, boosting productivity, and increasing jobs.
He said over the last two decades, Africa had made significant progress in digitalisation, and it had established the first-mile infrastructure, connecting countries on the continent to the global internet.
Mr Chen in a statement issued in Accra said it had tripled its middle-mile internet infrastructures that expanded the connection within and between countries, however, there were still challenges to overcome.
After two years of virtual gatherings, the annual AfricaCom event, Africa’s largest technology conference made its in-person return this year, 2022 at the Cape Town International Conference Centre (CTICC) brought together African operators, industry elites, and opinion leaders.
The event on the theme: “Lighting up the Future,” shared insight on cutting-edge trends in the telecom industry, including 4G/5G co-development, Firepower Management Center intelligent connectivity, digital operations transformation, and green development leading the future of digital networks in Africa.
He said “Today, we still need to improve the last-mile broadband infrastructure and bridge the digital divide between urban and rural areas.” Chen said.
Mr Chen delivering a presentation entitled “Lighting up the Future with Nonstop Innovation,” said Huawei’s latest ICT development concepts and successful digital transformation solutions.
He said, “The high resilience and rapid growth of the continent’s digital economy, technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, and cloud are evolving rapidly and the adoption of ICT in a wide range of industries is growing.”
The President of Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Region aid “We need to further deepen connectivity to connect more people, enterprises, and scenarios; unleash digital productivity and enable digital transformation in multiple industries; increase the ICT industry’s energy-efficiency and leverage ICT technologies to reduce emissions across all industries.”
Of relevance to the African context were case studies around the digital transformation of the port and mining sectors in China, which had attracted wide attention from its African counterparts.
These case studies provided a good example and reference for the potential of the development of the digital economy in Africa, as 90 per cent of Africa’s imports and exports travels by sea, and mining is an important source of wealth creation for many African countries.
He said as Africa’s digital ship sails into the future, it required a strong tail wind to propel it forward.
Mr Chen called for more favourable industrial policies, and more cooperation between public and private sectors.
He said Huawei had set up four innovation centres in Africa, launched several plans to support the development of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and would train 100 000 digital champions in Africa over the next three years.
At AfricaCom, Huawei also displayed a range of innovative technologies and solutions, including the Very Large-Scale Antenna Array and solutions such as Ultra-Wideband RRU, that addressed some of the obstacles such as inconsistent spectrum resources and insufficient fibreoptic network reach that are holding Africa back.
