African techies who won ICT competition to visit Facebook,Google headquarters

david nganga

January 2, 2018 11:14 AM

The five-day study trip to the United States will start this Saturday.

Two African techies

Hamza Jebbour, an information technology expert from Morocco, and Charles Mutua, a Bsc Computer Science and Physics finalist at Kenyatta University, emerged the best among 20 entrants drawn from African countries in the 2017 edition of the yearly Cisco Networking Academy’s NetRiders competition.

The duo floored over 15,400 entrants in the third round of the competition which saw the two excel to first and second place respectively.

The two, as well as other ten finalists drawn from across the world, will fly to the United States “to learn from the best technology companies in the world”.

Part of their trip will see them visit the Stanford University, the headquarters of Google and Facebook.

Mr David Brunei, the Cisco manager in charge of the East Africa market, confirmed that the tech firm has already made all travel and accommodation arrangements.

The competition is part of Cisco’s CSR flagship programme, the Networking Academy (NetAcad) – launched in 1998, a global Cisco programme that offers IT skills and career building courses for learning institutions and individuals.

Over 9500 NetAcademies have been created so far in more than 170 countries, with more than six million students trained.

david nganga