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Africa faces shortage of IT skills - Hamid

Africa faces shortage of IT skills - Hamid
By Agness Changala
Thursday May 01, 2008 [04:00]

SOUTH African based CISCO systems area academy manager Alfie Hamid has disclosed that Africa requires 1.3 million networking professionals by 2012 for technology to operate effectively. In an interview yesterday Hamid said Africa faced a massive shortage of Information Technology (IT) both in industries and learning institutions.

“There’s a massive shortage and it is important for more institutions to come on board and provide IT skills,” he said.

Hamid said institutions were being brought together and empowering them with the most current technology.

He said the organisation mostly targeted the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) so that new ideas and experiences could be shared to improve IT systems.

Hamid said the organisation also encouraged gender equity by introducing mechanisms that would attract more female students to IT.

“We have a deliberate policy to drop the prices involved so as to encourage more females,” he said.

Hamid said there was a misconception that IT was only for men so the females were being encouraged not to look at it that way.

Hamid said the organisation was encouraging academies to take the programmes beyond universities, colleges and secondary schools.

And education minister Geoffrey Lungwangwa after launching the conference on IT shortage in Africa said that the challenge of the CISCO conference was to appreciate the difficult terrain in which Africa found itself in and what intervention it would bring to bridging the gaps that impede success in learning.

Labels: EDUCATION, ITC

posted by MrK @ 6:11 AM