#TechFriday: Becoming tech savvy in Egypt

Journalists from Namibia, Senegal, Lesotho, Botswana and Zimbabwe took a tour around the Institute that is based in the Smart Village in Cairo, Egypt.

Journalists from Namibia, Senegal, Lesotho, Botswana and Zimbabwe took a tour around the Institute that is based in the Smart Village in Cairo, Egypt.

Published Dec 7, 2018

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As part of the Union of African Journalists programme in Cairo, journalists attending the course visited several media organisations in the city.

Among them was the Smart Village, home to various technological companies in the country.

The Information Technology Institute was formed in 1993 and has six main branches with two based in Cairo.

The institute specialises in training people to become tech savvy.

“We were reached out to by different countries in Africa to contribute in training their students. We want our student to work after they finish their training and know the technology trends of markets that are not mature yet,” said Fatma Alashmawi, a business development executive at the institute.

The specialisations changed depending on what trends are forming in the world of technology. The last few years have seen development around the Suez Canal so the institute investigated the technologies that would be needed.

Fatma Alashmawi is the business development executive at the popular Information Technology Institute at the Smart Village based in Cairo, Egypt

“The kind of demands that companies ask from students of different specialisations is how we focus our training. We have saturation in software assurance testing and development and lesser at IoT (Internet of Things) application development because it is a new trend as the market is not mature enough,” said Alashmawi.

The popular 9-month development programme at the institute has 32 specialisations with 10 000 applicants every year and only 900 of those getting a spot get a spot.

The casual learning offers training in artificial intelligence, learning hackathons, mobile developer weekends, Egypt Big Data and the Global Game Jam that is held in January every year.  The Jam has sites all over the world with the Institute having the first one in Egypt and holding the Guiness record for the largest number of participants from one country.

The institute also trains young minds from age 10-16 on different technologies available to them like robotics and graphic design and how to use technology to develop programmes.

The Information Technology Institute had also contributed to upskilling technology students in Djibouti, Burundi, Eritrea Uganda and Sudan.

@mane_mpi

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