DotConnectAfrica
was privileged to be among the delegates to the AITEC Africa Summit held at the
Oshwal Centre, Nairobi, 24-25 October .AITEC is the continent’s leading
business event organizer for the ICT sector, is celebrating 25 years of serving
Africa’s ICT community by holding a series of regional ICT Summits each year.
The Summit covers West, Southern and East Africa.
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| DotConnectAfrica at AITEC 2012 |
The
Summit brought together speakers from all over the globe to discuss ICT with
the theme: “Smart Cities > Smart Societies > Smart Enterprises” and it
also included a market-leading business-to-business exhibition alongside the
extensive conference programme, whose focus areas were Data Security World
,Cloud Computing World ,Mobile Applications World Smart Exports: ICT-empowered
services.
Africa
is gaining much ground in the ICT fiend and a such has become the focus of
world leading firms to develop and establish long standing business enterprise
relationships across the continent. This coupled with an extensive and
ambitious multiple fiber connectivity that has provided the much needed
broadband capacity to accommodate the rising need for bandwidth and favorable
speeds.
The
mobile sector is also largely the most advancing facet of the African internet
quest for attaining the levels of developed nations in this information age.
This comes clear even as the statistics show an exponential increase in the
number of mobile devices subscribers, this coupled with young innovators who
have risen to the task of developing locally compliant mobile applications to
serve the immediate needs of its market share.
While
giving his key note speech, The Permanent Secretary Ministry of
Information and Communications Dr. Ndemo stressed on the need for the
young people to be empowered so that they can be self reliant especially now
that more opportunities for developing local content and applications is great,
Speaking on the Smart cities, he noted the importance of developing such cyber
cities to match the rapidly changing internet landscape. This includes
Deploying ICT solutions to increase the quality of life for both urban and
rural populations while delivering improved services in healthcare, education,
agriculture and housing.
Issues
of Cyber Security were also part of great deliberations with the panelists as
well as delegates stressing on the importance of new focus in the development
of mechanisms to counter the rise of cyber threats, a fact that is more real
now than ever before. Cloud Computing was also a key topic with the experts
outlining the rising need for the cloud technology to be utilized,
delegates also learned on the implications and the need for a concerted effort
to analyze risks as well as benefits before deploying the cloud.
Another
important session included the “ICT Skills Gap Forum” whose eminent panelists
included industry , academia and Government experts who discussed extensively
on the rapidly dynamic workforce environment and how to fill the gap that
exists between the Academic and job sector. Since the workforce IT needs keep
changing. “It has therefore become imperative that academic institutions
actively engage with the private sector and government to be aware of what they
need to incorporate into their curricula in order to prepare their graduates
adequately for the job market” said Sean Moroney, Chairman AITEC.
“There
is no doubt that universities and tertiary institutions are providing a large
pool of graduates. The problem however lies in the large disparity between
academia and work. Accreditation has therefore become key in this market”
Concluded Kevit Desai, Chairman of the Linking Industry With Academia (LIWA)
Trust.
In
closing, the Minister of Information and Communications Hon, Samuel Phogisio
Concluded by thanking the conveners of the AITEC Summit especially recognizing
Mr. Moroney for working tirelessly for over 25 years to continuously organize
successful events to tackle changing ICT sector, he noted that more needed to
be done even as Kenya and indeed Africa and the world were embracing ICT
DotConnectAfrica
looks forward to attending more AITEC summits and congratulates AITEC for 25
years of excellence.
