The National Electronic Media Institute of South Africa (NEMISA) in collaboration with the University of South Africa and Walter Sisulu University hosted a 5th annual NEMISA digital skills summit in East London from the 21 to 23 February , the summit was hosted under the theme “Digital skills, economic Uncertainly, and Employment” and the summit offers a unique platform for diverse community of researchers, professionals and enthusiasts in digital technology and education to exchange ideas, foster collaboration and drive the digital skills agenda forward.
The CEO of NEMISA Trevor Rammitlwa explained on their broad mandate and said it is about delivering digital skills to the entire country particularly focusing in rural areas and townships, their focus is on young people and women because out of the digital divine experienced in South Africa , women are the mostly affected especially those in rural areas.
He further explained and said “Our programme assists towards building a digital transformed society; we are not only targeting matriculants, even children in schools because they need to be introduced to technologies so they could have basic skills from an early age”. He added “we do creative media skills that cover content production from radio side or podcasting, we have full qualifications up to certificate level and short courses that includes the lights of digital photography, storytelling using a mobile device, vlogging to help young people to take advantage of this available opportunities including monitoring of the content”.
The Top 5 team that participated in last year’s NEMISA Datathon Finale at UNISA main campus in Tshwane presented their refined solution were the winning team was awarded R100 000, teams of were invited to identify the problems in communicates were they come from and to come out with innovations, the new things that has not been done. Amongst the teams that presented, the “Hack are Tech” team presented about the mobile application that would address mental health challenges and offering personalised support where you join according to how you feel.
One of the team members Tylab Diba emphasised “I’d like to advise you to choose ‘Manmate’ the best mate. We are not just a mobile application but we are powerful, lets remove the stigma against mental health”.
Mampilo Phahlane who is a director on the school of computing in the college of Science, Engineering and technology at UNISA said that she believes that the relation they have with NEMISA is multi corroborative in both sides as it compasses research, she further explained “the relation is all about research and skilling learners, we get to train young people in programming and testing when Hackathon are happens in UNISA”. “
This summit helps us to have insight in crafting new courses and using other research for other purposes including sharing with the universities their curriculums and also government improving its policies in terms of advancing digital skills and digital transformation in the country”, Rammitlwa concluded.