Wits students receive life-changing bursaries from Huawei South Africa

Huawei South Africa handed over bursaries to a select group of postgraduate Information and Communications Technology (ICT) students of the University of the Witwatersrand.

The Wits bursaries are part of a wider program that will see Huawei supporting 48 students from five Universities: the University of KwaZulu-Natal, University of Pretoria, Wits, University of Cape Town, and the University of Western Cape with bursaries worth R7 million this year. The program also recognises that there is a shortage of skilled ICT professionals in South Africa and that corporates have a role to play in boosting those numbers.

Daniel Jiang, human resources development for Huawei, thinks South Africa has no shortage of young, talented people capable of being groomed into world-class technology professionals, however, too often, they simply aren’t given the necessary opportunities.

For information systems honours student, Bolekwa Mboniswa, the bursary represents the chance to fulfill years of hard work and is a reward for finding a field of study she’s passionate about. “I was the only person to be admitted into Wits during my matric year and the second in the entire history of the high school I went to, so I felt a lot of pressure to succeed,” said Mboniswa. She added that she did encounter failure, however, when she enrolled in mining engineering and lost her scholarship. Rather than giving up, she took it as a sign that she was in the wrong field and enrolled in information systems instead.

“My first year was hard since I was staying at home but I received NSFAS funding in my second year, which eventually led to me graduating in record time with a few distinctions.” Now that the Cosmo City resident is pursuing postgraduate studies, the bursary will be a major help in her achieving her long-term goal of being a beacon of hope to township boys and girls. For now, though, she’s concentrating on completing her honours and graduating cum laude so I can contribute as much value as possible to any team I am in.

For fellow Wits student, third-year Lerato Hlagala, the bursary is a chance to fulfill a long-term ambition to get into the technology space. “My goal is to become a professional software developer,” she said. “I would love to be part of a software organisation where I could share the knowledge and talents that I have learned. I want to be part of a place where I would gain more skills and grow as an individual.”

She hoped the bursary would help her get where she wanted to be. “I am already learning a lot more than I would have without this support, especially now that I have added an extra module from Huawei to my studies. It allows me to focus and fully pay attention to my books without getting distracted by unpaid expenses.”