Team Namibia Wins over half a million dollars in Huawei's Tech4Good Global Competition 2023

[Shenzhen, China, January 16, 2024] Team Namibia was crowned the global Champion of the 3rd Seeds for the Future Tech4Good Global Competition. The team comprises of talented students from The Namibia University of Science and Technology and The University of Namibia. The team's winning submission was an AI-powered teaching solution called YYeni AI that caters to the needs of every student. The prize includes a whooping USD$30 000 (over half a million Namibia dollars) as seed capital; a sponsorship for a trip to China, as well as a one-on-one session with a Huawei Executive.

YYeni AI, which provides personalized tutoring to individual students in large classes, is incubated at NUST’s Namibia Business Innovation Institute (NBII), under a student-based Acceleration Programme which aims to equip incubatees with the necessary entrepreneurial skills to enhance and fulfill their business aspirations. This forms part of the University’s strategic plan to capacitate start-ups and Small and Medium Enterprises with innovative tools to grow sustainably.

The app uses AI algorithms to guide students through their coursework and show their real-time progress. This greatly improves students' learning experience even when teaching resources are scarce.

The Second and Third Prizes in this year's Competition went to Team Uzbekistan's Aquatibia Solution and Team Germany's TraceWaters Solution. Team Uzbekistan was also named Champion of the Tech4Good Middle East and Central Asia Regional Competition in September 2023.

The Tech4Good Global Competition encourages students to look at sustainable development challenges facing their communities and use their ICT knowledge and skills to create commercially viable solutions. In 2023, 152 teams from 74 countries and regions participated in the competition, 70% more than in 2022. A People's Choice Award was also bestowed this year based on public voting. The total number of votes received was nearly 300,000, with Team Brazil and Team Uzbekistan coming out on top.

Jaimee Stuart, Senior Researcher at the United Nations University Institute in Macau, praised the finalists of this year's competition. "Technology can effectively solve pressing global challenges, especially those related to sustainable development,” she said. “The students' solutions have shown an innovative perspective on addressing both social development requirements and market needs."

Jeff Wang, President of Huawei's Public Affairs and Communications Dept, attended the awards ceremony virtually via an innovative, highly-realistic avatar technology. Huawei Cloud's MetaStudio digital content production pipeline orchestrated the demonstration by training the Pangu Virtual Human Model with Wang's image and voice data.

Wang called this year's participants the backbone of our future digital society and praised their obvious passion for using digital technology to promote social inclusion. He noted that their solutions were designed to address several sustainability and social issues, from natural resource protection and cancer diagnosis to education equity and sign language translation. Wang also announced that the top three teams and winners of the People's Choice Award will be invited to participate in a Seeds for the Future digital tour to China in 2024.

For more information please visit: https://www.huawei.com/minisite/seeds-for-the-future/tech4good.html.

https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2024/1/seedsforthefuture-tech4good