Session 9: Skills And Home Grown Innovation For Sustainable Digital Transformation

gateways to neighbouring countries and recently received colleagues from Botswana and South Africa who were exploring the prospect of utilising fibrecom networks to deliver services to their clients. He added that this team was impressed with the capacity of fibrecom network and attested that they currently don’t have clients who are operating on 100G network. In terms of resilience, he said that fibrecom has an extensive network that makes it possible to re-route transmission in case of traffic breakdown and that there is a lot of human capacity development in the areas of wireless broadband and currently three of IT team members are attending training in Malaysia. In response to the question on the message to the future generation with regards to development and harnessing of home grown solutions, Mr. Kelvin Haule said that the idea is to develop local innovative solutions that will help eliminate licensing costs incurred to external firms like European dynamics.

Mr. Likonga Lindunda also shared that Eleven years ago, Bongohive was started with business partners and over the years had been working with great minds to build viable market solutions. He added that looking at the challenge of harnessing and developing Home grown solutions, Bongohive is working tirelessly to develop solutions that will change the world and that they host many training sessions for young people where they provide space for them to create their own content and learn from each other and provide opportunities that are not offered in mainstream education facilities. This entails providing resources to help young people actualize their potential. Mr. Lindunda also said that they are actively involved in talent search and are working in partnership with Universities, private sector and relevant government wings where the message is about complementary efforts to deliver real-time market solutions.

Dr. Greg Nsofu highlighted that the general skills are adequate, but there are gaps with regards to specialized skills for the country to be in tandem with the current state of technological advancement. There are currently organisations like ZPPA that are looking for specific skills that are not locally available. “We therefore need to identify talent and harness it to the level desired by the industry,” he said. He further added that there is more to be done at the level of early development of ICT skills at primary and second.