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General Electric and the Africa Leadership University (ALU) have announced the kick-off of the third cohort of the Africa Industrial Internet Programme (AIIP), aimed at equipping young Africans with skills that will enable them to take part in the fourth industrial revolution.
The 2020 cohort has enrolled 35 students from eight countries across Africa, including nine Nigerians drawn from oil and gas, transportation, power, energy, manufacturing, healthcare, telecoms and aviation. Over the last two years, the rigorous training programme has graduated 64 students, 21 of them Nigerians, of which 50 were fully sponsored by GE from a scholarship fund totalling $500,000.
GE will give 10 full scholarships for the current cohort.
Launched in 2018, the programme has empowered participants with essential skills for building applications for the Industrial Internet, which enables machine-to-machine communication that results in systems that can collect, analyze, and deliver data in real-time. These features provide significant benefits such as predicting when a device will require maintenance, enhancing logistics management, enhancing quality and optimizing safety.
The training takes place at a time when spending on the Internet of Things is predicted to reach a trillion US dollars by 2021, with the total number of connected devices being projected to rise to 75.44 billion worldwide by 2025, a fivefold increase in ten years.
Commenting on the programme, Farid Fezoua, president/CEO for GE Africa, said, “As a digital industrial company, it’s exciting to see how over the last two years the AIIP has developed an ecosystem of digital engineers that utilise data science as an enabler for their work across industries, developing solutions for the most pressing challenges. Our partnership with ALU for the AIIP is a testament of our commitment to develop the next generation of leaders that will drive solutions made in Africa for Africa in this transformative digital age.”
