UWI St Augustine principal Professor Clement Sankat has described funding for research and development in T&T as “not great” and has appealed to Huawei, a leading global information and communication technology company, to assist the university in sourcing that funding.
He did so at the signing of a memorandum of understanding and launch of Telecom Seeds for the Future initiative between Huawei and UWI. The initiative will provide six second-year ICT and Telecommunication Studies students from UWI an opportunity to visit China and work at the company’s headquarters in Shenzhen. The students will be given first hand learning opportunities through interactions with staff at the company and visits to Huawei’s laboratory where they will receive training.
Sankat asked that, in addition to the newly launched programme, Huawei work with the university to develop a laboratory for communications technology hardware at the Faculty of Engineering. He said he wanted the university’s electrical and computer engineering students to have knowledge and expertise in the latest communications hardware for the digital world.
Sankat said Huawei globally invests US$10 billion in its own research and development and “that’s why I told Jason Deng (Huawei’s T&T general manager) I would like a little piece of the action right here in T&T.”
He added: “I am going to appeal to Huawei to come to our support, not only for the training, which is a great start, but to now look at research and development and building the partnership with our university or Faculty of Engineering or Faculty of Science and Technology to advance that cause.” He said that would be a step in the right direction in an environment where “there is no money.”
Deng said the initiative is Huawei’s global flagship corporate social responsibility programme and a great deal of money is invested in it.
“We do this because ICT now is transforming all industries. Through ICT, traditional sectors such as education, security, transportation, and finance services have been given new life,” he said.