Microsoft’s Africa Transformation Office (ATO) is announcing a two-day Xbox Game Studios Game Camp in Africa. To empower African creators to realize their potential in the gaming industry through unique learning experiences from industry leaders. The conference will run from July 15th – 16th, 2023.
The two full days events are themed “The Journey of a Game” and will offer multiple perspectives on the complex craft of game development. In addition, there will be online learning components to the camp, which will allow participants to engage with focused training modules on topics that align closely with their skills and interests, before and after the event.
While the camp is available online for all registered campers, Game Camp will also host in-person viewing events for 100 selected campers at the Microsoft campuses in Cairo, Johannesburg, Lagos, and Nairobi. These sites will offer viewing parties on-site panel sessions and opportunities to meet with Microsoft and Xbox personnel. Furthermore, teams or individuals with games to pitch are encouraged to do so.
To participate, individuals must be of legal age, reside in any country on the African continent, and be studying or working part or full-time in the field of software development, visual arts, 3D, music and audio, web design, narrative design, or professional project management. See the complete list of participation requirements at Xbox.com.
“At Xbox, we’re on a mission to bring the joy and community of gaming to the world’s 3 billion gamers and we recognize that Africa is home to the largest population of youth in the world, many who love to play. In 2019 I attended the opening of our Africa Development Centre and met with tech leaders, educators, and developers from across the region to understand their vision for the future of game creation. Through the inaugural Xbox Game Studios Camp Africa, in collaboration with Microsoft’s Africa Transformation Office, we have an opportunity to continue to deepen our relationships with talented developers in region and help African games studios realize their vision and role in the global gaming industry,” said Phil Spencer, CEO, Gaming at Microsoft.
The Xbox Game Studios Game Camp program is an initiative that unifies various Xbox initiatives under one umbrella where talent is celebrated and game developers are empowered to pursue their dreams.
“At Microsoft, we are excited to enable African game developers and creators to build faster through access to tools and resources, and to help their games be discovered by players in Africa and around the world. We want to grow strong roots in this significant market for gaming and game development. The ATO and Xbox personnel will also combine efforts to identify game studios to invest in through our Startups acceleration program and venture capital investment partners. I’m looking forward to seeing what innovative concepts this Game Camp produces,” says Wael Elkabbany, Strategic Initiatives Lead for Microsoft CEMA.
University student teams from Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa are among the shortlisted finalist of the 2023 Microsoft Imagine Cup world finals. They are among 16 teams who will represent the Europe Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region at the Microsoft Imagine Cup student technology competition.
The African teams consist of seven teams from Kenya, one from Nigeria, and one from South Africa. The remaining finalist teams from the region come from the UK, Pakistan, UAE, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The EMEA teams will be competing with 32 other finalist teams from the Americas and Asia regions. For a chance to win USD50,000 in prizes and a spot to present at the 2023 Microsoft Imagine Cup World Championship.
Only three teams will make it to the next stage of the technology competition. The teams will need to get the top-scoring points in the region or category to progress to the next stage. The winning teams will get support from Microsoft mentors to prepare for the World Championship in May during Microsoft Build. Where they will win the grand prize of USD100,000 and a mentoring session with Microsoft Chairman and CEO, Satya Nadella.
African student teams have been performing exceptionally well in the technology competition that seeks to empower the next generation of creators and problem-solvers. In 2021 and for the first time in its 19-year history, an African student team from Kenya won the technology competition.
Here is a highlight of the African teams and their projects.
2023 Microsoft Imagine Cup Africa finalists
Team CAi from Kenya. Project category: Health
CAi is an AI-powered wearable device that detects seizures both prior to occurrence and in real-time and alerts caretakers. It uses the patient’s vital signs and body movements to detect seizure-like symptoms.
Team Paramount from South Africa. Project category: Earth
This system addresses the lack of participation in recycling through a gamification approach. Users earn points and badges for recycling and can also use the app to identify the correct bin to use.
Team iBoost from Kenya. Project category: Lifestyle
iBoost is a smart signal amplifier that leverages Azure Machine Learning, Bing Maps platform, and a host of other Microsoft technologies to bring an end to the internet connectivity and cellular network challenges brought about by poor network coverage.
Team IBTRS from Nigeria. Project category: Lifestyle
Institution based transport system (IBTRS) is based on a shuttle management system, IBTRS uses a telegram bot and RFID system to book shuttles at an affordable price for institutions, students, and workers and maximize efficiency.
Team RIM from Kenya. Project category: Earth
RIM Energy is a Smart LPG regulator that improves safety, monitors consumption, detects gas leaks, alerts on refill, and measures carbon footprint to reduce GHG emissions in African households.
Team Score More from Kenya. Project category: Education
Udhamini web app is a platform that gives students access to a centralized repository of scholarships to make opportunities easier to find and ensure that students don’t miss deadlines.
Team Smart Farmer from Kenya. Project category: Earth
Smart Farmer aims to increase agricultural production in order to help reduce food waste using technology.
Team TAWI from Kenya. Project category: Education
Tawi is a home-based software app that helps children with Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) improve their auditory skills. It includes noise cancellation, sound amplification, speech-to-text conversion, and auditory training exercises.
Team Wastestars from Kenya. Project category: Earth
Wastestars aims to design a smart waste collection system that allows citizens to choose and post the various types of solid waste they want to dispose of on the website and for garbage collectors.
Mecer Inter-Ed (MIE) and Microsoft are giving 10 South African ladies the opportunity to break into tech or advance their IT careers with an internationally accredited Microsoft certification. The initiative dubbed #SheCanDoIT aims to evolve the ICT sector through the growth and enablement of women. It targets South African ladies between the ages of 21 and 30 who are passionate, curious, and have the desire to learn about technology.
Each selected lady will receive a laptop, Microsoft course, and exam vouchers. They will get mentorship sessions with female leaders in the ICT field, as well as step-by-step assistance from Mecer Inter-Ed’s qualified talent acquisition department. This Mercer says is “to ensure these South African ladies are ready and equipped for their new careers in IT“.
MIE and Microsoft are committed to investing in programs that support equality. This is why we are launching the #SheCanDoIT campaign, which aims to bring a fresh approach and offer unique opportunities to women in the tech field.
Mecer Inter-Ed, Microsoft #SheCanDoIt initiative requirements and steps
You must be a South African lady between the ages of 21 and 30.
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Dynamics 365 and Power Platform services are now generally available in the Mircosoft Africa datacentres. The Microsoft Business Applications will provide organizations with solutions to cut costs, improve efficiencies, drive business continuity and disaster recovery. The services are available in the Microsoft South Africa North and West datacentre regions located in Johannesburg and Cape Town respectively.
Dynamics 365 and Power Platform services feature the ability to rapidly store, analyze, and act on data with intelligent software. While maintaining data residency and sovereignty and meeting compliance and regulatory requirements.
Microsoft notes the continued upgrade of services shows its commitment to investing in Africa. As well as increasing cloud capacity and capabilities to enable organizations in the public and private sectors in the region to accelerate growth through innovation, agility, and resilience.
“Leaders in organizations across industries and sectors are focused on finding ways to improve the flow of innovation and knowledge across the business in order to respond to market changes, customer needs, and specific business and industry challenges at speed. They need digital solutions that break existing silos between data sources, people, processes, and insights,” says Karin Jones, Director of Business Applications GTM at Microsoft South Africa.
“This will accelerate digital innovation in the country by enabling businesses to become more agile, resilient, and competitive,” says Jones.
With this Microsoft now offers Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform online services to organizations in the region.
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GitHub announces the availability of GitHub Sponsors in 30 new regions including six located in Africa. The GitHub initiative is now available to open source developers and organizations in Kenya, Gambia, Egypt, South Africa, Tunisia and Morocco. Developers and creators located in these countries can start receiving financial support for their work.
GitHub says there is no waitlist and anyone in these countries with a bank account can sign up right away. All you have to do is to create a GitHub Sponsors profile. Check this post out on how to create a profile. Alternatively, if you were on the waitlist you are now automatically in the program. You should see an email in your inbox welcoming you to the program. Anyone can sponsor, but you must reside in a supported region to receive funds.
we are here to support the humans behind human progress
GitHub Sponsors is an initiative by GitHub that allows anyone who contributes to open source to receive financial support. It is built for funding all types of work that advance open source software. Providing opportunities to participate in and build on open source, either through code, documentation, design, technical writing, mentorship, etc. It also provides a platform for the developer community to financially support the people and organizations who design, build, and maintain the open source projects they depend on, directly on GitHub.
GitHub says financially supporting the people who build and maintain open source is key to ensuring a healthy and sustainable open source ecosystem. The announcement makes the initiative now available in 68 countries or regions.
Through the GitHub Sponsors explore tool, GitHub has made it easy for anyone across the world to discover projects and maintainers and support them.
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Microsoft South Africa has launched the Microsoft SITA Ndivho Innovation Centre in Centurion, Pretoria in partnership with SITA (the State Information Technology Agency). The centre aims to spur innovation and global competitiveness, as well as build the ICT capability and skills development, of local, provincial and government departments in order to enhance service delivery and drive broader economic growth.
The creation of the centre forms part of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed between SITA and Microsoft South Africa in October 2019, aimed at accelerating the digital transformation of government services in South Africa through the adoption of public cloud services.
A key element of the MOU was modernisation and innovation, and the Ndivho Innovation Centre supports this goal through Microsoft technologies that will accelerate the development of cloud solutions and skills required in today’s digital economies.
“Having a space dedicated to collaboration, digital innovation, skills development and capacity building provides a unique opportunity to create new services for government departments and customers. The centre will also help to unlock IT and organisational productivity and efficiencies in service delivery that will deliver inclusive growth for the country and better enable economic recovery,” says Mr. Luvuyo Keyise, interim Managing Director at SITA.
These services and benefits will be enabled predominantly through Microsoft Cloud-enabled solutions in the areas of Critical Infrastructure, Public Safety & Justice, Defense and Intelligence and Life Sciences. Additionally, the centre will showcase the transformative value of Microsoft’s cloud services such as Azure, its collaboration solutions Microsoft 365 and business solutions Dynamics 365. However, the centre is not limited to Microsoft technologies and provides an innovation platform for Government’s technology investments.
Upskilling and enabling public sector employees and small, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) is a critical part of the drive towards modernisation and innovation, and the two partners have also invested in a number of initiatives to equip individuals and business owners with the skills and certification needed to deliver services to government.
These initiatives include:
The Microsoft Enterprise Skills Initiative and the Microsoft Community Training Platform will be used by internal SITA employees to reskill and become technically astute, and to provide consulting services around digital transformation and moving into the Microsoft Cloud.
The Emerging Partner Programme identifies and provides ICT SMMEs with training to accelerate their journey to Microsoft Gold partner status. The programme is currently underway and 25 SMMEs from across all nine provinces are receiving certification training to help grow a sustainable, diversified and inclusive supply chain that contributes more broadly to economic growth in the country.
KEI Solutions and Take Note IT are two of the 25 beneficiaries of the Emerging Partner Programme. “A dream only stays a dream if you don’t take action, so I registered my IT infrastructure company during the height of the pandemic, knowing that my competitors were large organisations with a long-standing history and experience in the sector,” says Kabelo Mbelle, Managing Director and Founder of KEI Solutions. “Being part of the Emerging Partner Programme turned being an SMME into a unique selling point by allowing us to sit on the shoulders of giants like Microsoft and SITA and giving us the vantage point to see and equip ourselves with the training and certification needed to compete and succeed in the sector.”
Cindy Ntombela, Cyber Security Analyst at Take Note IT, agrees: “The ability to partner and work with government and one of the biggest technology companies globally provides a unique opportunity to not only identify the broader skills needed in the country, but learn these on-demand skills, share knowledge with like-minded professionals and channel this experience into the right paths to create real business value and enable the personal and professional development for South African ICT professionals.”
Collaboration across sectors is key. “Partnering with SITA and investing in the centre and other initiatives is a vital part of Microsoft’s commitment to leverage cloud and emerging technologies to accelerate growth through innovation, work across sectors to better serve citizens’ needs, empower individuals and SMMEs with critical future-ready skills, and create broader societal impact,” says Lillian Barnard, Chief Executive Officer at Microsoft South Africa.
“Microsoft fully supports SITA’s vision to digitise government to accelerate and enhance innovation and service delivery as part of our shared commitment to driving competitiveness, skills development and economic growth in the country – and the launch of the Ndivho Innovation Centre is an important step in reaching this goal.”
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