Four computer science final year students of United States International University – Africa (USIS), Kenya, are the winners of the 2021 Microsoft Imagine Cup World Championship. The team wins the competition trophy, USD 125000 and a mentoring session with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Named Team REWEBA, they become the first student team from Africa to lift the prestigious Microsoft Imagine Cup World Championship trophy in its 19-year history. The student team beat three other finalist teams from New Zealand, the United States and Thailand to win the competition.
Their journey began by beating ten thousands of students entries from 163 countries to qualify for the online semifinals round. They then progressed as part of 40 teams to qualify for round one of the World Finals stage. Where two other student teams from Kenya; Cafrilearn and INTELLIVOLT qualified to compete. At the world finals stage, Team REWBA emerged winners of the healthcare category. Advancing to the World Championship which took place during Microsoft Build 2021.
The students showcased an IoT-based early warning system for babies using technologies such as Machine Learning, IoT, Analytics, etc. Their innovation, Remote Well Baby (REWEBA), remotely monitors infant parameters during regular post-natal screening. It then sends measurements to doctors remotely, allowing for immediate interventions saving infants from fatal diseases and reducing infant mortality rates.
The Kenya students; Khushi Gupta, Jeet Gohil, Dharmik Karania and Abdihamid Ali, win USD 75,000 cash, USD 50,000 Microsoft Azure grant and will get a mentoring session with Satya Nadella.
The students are planning to enhance and scale their project. They will also launch a startup in Kenya that provides better access to healthcare especially to those in marginalized areas.
Watch the World Championship below.
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Microsoft is announcing it has helped over 30 million people in 249 countries and territories acquire digital skills. Out of this, over one million learners across Africa participated in the Microsoft Global Skills program.
The global skills initiative offers free online courses across Microsoft, LinkedIn, and GitHub learning platforms. It seeks to help people, mostly those affected by the pandemic gain in-demand skills to be employable.
Across the Middle East and Africa region, 2.1 million learners have participated in the program. With software development, customer service, project manager and data analysis being the popular learning paths among learners.
The top 10 countries with learners across Africa are South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Morocco, Kenya, Tunisia, Algeria, Ghana, Senegal and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Comoros, Sao tome and Principe, Eritrea, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Seychelles and the Central African Republic are countries with less than 500 learners.
To get more Africans to acquire digital skills, Microsoft is also partnering with organizations and governments. Offering additional funding and services to make this possible where this is necessary.
Microsoft is extending the free LinkedIn Learning and Microsoft Learn courses and low-cost certifications that align to 10 of the most in-demand jobs offer through 2021.
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Check out other stories making the news in the technology ecosystem in Africa and the Middle East.
Microsoft is supporting literally the lifecycle of a developer in the Middle East and Africa says Julien Bertin, Azure Business Lead for Middle East and Africa for Microsoft.
From the time you graduate to the time you retire literally. At every single step of the journey, we have programs to re-skill yourself. Microsoft is fully embracing this journey with the different programs we are launching. Like student certifications. If you are coming out of university and looking for jobs we do placements as well.
Julien made this revelation during an interview with Seth Juarez, Principal Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, for an episode of CodeStories on Channel 9. Where Seth asked Julien what Microsoft is doing to empower developers in the Middle East and Africa region.
Microsoft, Julien notes is one of the first cloud providers to invest in development skills on the African continent. With the launch of two development centers in Kenya and Nigeria.
This enables us and the people in the region to create the skills and generate the value here in the region for Africa.
We want to accelerate digital transformation and the capture of wealth that comes out from digital information. We want to invest in infrastructure, skilling(students and non-graduate students) and enabling innovation in the region.
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In the midst of the covid-19 pandemic and people getting laid off, Microsoft announced a global digital skills initiative. Offering free online courses to help people boost their digital skills or gain new relevant skills to be employable.
Three months after the announcement, the company shared about ten million people have enrolled in a course from two hundred and thirty-one countries.
In November 2020, the Microsoft Africa team noted that nine hundred thousand people are from the Middle East and Africa (MEA).
This number doesn’t look like a lot looking at the population of the MEA region. With Microsoft noting connectivity as one of the challenges in the MEA region.
To try and get more people across the region skilled up, Microsoft is partnering with organizations and governments to achieve this. Offering additional funding and services.
In South Africa, Microsoft is pledging one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Afrika Tikkun. To help further its efforts of recruiting fifty thousand job hunters to take participate in one of the learning paths.
So far, the popular learning paths in the free online courses include software development, customer service and data analysis.
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Check out other stories making the news in the technology ecosystem in Africa and the Middle East.
Microsoft Education Lead for North, West, East & Southern Africa, Levant & Pakistan countries, Angela Nganga, shares on what learners and facilitators can do to ensure a safe digital learning environment as they learn.
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world, quoted South African activist and former president Nelson Mandela. Investment in education is one of the biggest investments any country can make for its current and future generation. Currently, around 420 million people across the world would be lifted out of poverty with secondary education consequently improving the quality of life globally by more than half.
Today, as more and more people across the African continent are required to stay home due to government lockdown interventions, we are seeing a massive shift towards remote learning. This has meant the growth in the usage of collaborative tools such as Microsoft’s Teams to create virtual classrooms wherein educators can communicate with their students in real-time.
In the Middle East and Africa Emerging markets alone, over 1.5 Million students and teachers are leveraging Microsoft Teams as the remote learning platform during this period.
Through such platforms, educators can connect with and support students in much the same way they could in person with live meetings wherein they are able to show video, share presentations, and even invite external speakers for virtual field trips.
But, as students and educators move online, naturally there is an increase in the risks to security and safety.
As we adjust to the new normal and governments take the much needed next steps towards safely re-opening the economies and adopting possible return to school strategies, blended learning will play a key role in ensuring that some of the non – essential aspects of learning that do not require face to face interaction are enabled while ensuring the online safety and security of students.
Educational institutions, therefore, need to take steps to ensure that digital learning environments are safe by setting up concrete policies and restrictions when using these tools to guard students’ safety, while also ensuring that online classrooms remain engaging and giving educators the tools they need to create a focused learning environment.
Restricting access to meetings can safeguard students
There have already been multiple occurrences around the world wherein unauthorised users have gained access to virtual classrooms.
Just this month alone we’ve seen an online graduation ceremony interrupted with racial slurs by hackers, last month a man gained access to an online class and exposed himself and another online lecture was interrupted by playing audio of inappropriate content.
When educators set up meetings to teach students a link is created which participants can use to enter these meetings. Sharing these links online to reach students can seem like a quick and easy way to communicate with students when and how to enter live meetings but this also opens meetings up to anyone who sees the link.
To ensure the safe digital learning environment of educators and students, administrators should instead create identities (or profiles) for each student and teacher which requires them to log into the tool to join the meeting. Within Teams, administrators can thereafter choose to turn off the ability for anonymous users to join the meeting by changing it within the meeting policies.
Within meetings, educators can also make sure that all students are present in the classroom and there are no unexpected attendees by selecting “show participants” in the meeting controls giving them greater control over who is admitted into the lesson.
Managing the virtual classroom keeps students safely engaged
Educators are often required to manage students in physical classrooms to ensure good behaviour and keep students focused on learning the coursework being taught. This is required when teaching online as well.
Online classrooms introduce a new dynamic for both teachers and students alike making managing disruptions and curbing inappropriate messaging, a task which educators need to perform in new ways. Now, these disturbances can also appear in the form of unauthorised users with disruption often being their main goal.
To manage disruptions while ensuring the safety of students, administrators should limit students’ ability to schedule meetings, initiate private calls, and monitor chat sessions to remove inappropriate messaged in channel meetings. This can be done by restricting meeting roles for students within a meeting.
Educators can control the learning environment further in Teams by creating meetings for classes within specific channels which allows them to disable student-to-student chat if necessary and allows them to track class discussions in context.
Other functionalities such as being able to blur video backgrounds, mute participants, and control who can present during the meeting are key for ensuring safe learning for students with Teams.
A new world of learning
We have entered an unexpected and often challenging time where in just over a month the education landscape has completely transformed. But as we have also seen, technology is a powerful tool that can be used to overcome these challenges and sometimes even improve on functions such as learning. With technology, education can be interactive, engaging, and controlled as long as we ensure digital security to protect students and staff online.
As a way to support educational institutions as they work to ensure a safe digital learning environment, Microsoft has created a more in-depth guide to serve as a foundation to their safety plans, and thus help to give teachers, students, and parents’ peace of mind while also making learning more productive.
Microsoft invites leaders of organizations across the Middle East and Africa to join its Reimagine Tomorrow virtual summit to explore ways to adapt, reinvent and transform using technology. The virtual conference will take place on July 7 and 8 2020.
Noting these are unprecedented moments, the company is inviting leaders at all levels to what it calls, “explore the art of the possible“. Microsoft shares that “technology will be a key ally in re-booting enterprise” as countries start preparing for the post-Covid-19 era.
The event will feature session tracks in HR, CIO, CFO, CMO, Retail, Telecommunications, Financial Services Industry, Education, Energy, Mining and Manufacturing.
The event invitation form Microsoft reads;
This is your exclusive invite to join the Microsoft Re-imagine Tomorrow virtual summit, where we will explore the art of the possible for you and your business, and start to move forward, together!
Lillian Barnard, Managing Director, Microsoft South Africa will lead the keynote session. Peter DeBenedictis, CMO Microsoft MEA, Gavin Holme, Services Lead Microsoft South Africa and other Microsoft and Microsoft Partner executives will lead various sessions over the two days.
Visit the Reimagine Tomorrow Virtual Summit event page to register for free and participate.
