Following up from the Brics Summit, last month, the bloc’s Future Skills Challenge took place virtually and in person in Johannesburg.
Tech gurus from South Africa, Brazil, Russia, India and China are battling it out to come up with the best solutions for the world’s most pressing challenges.
BRICS Future skills development
In a bid to enable businesses to meet and respond to new and emerging skills challenges, the Skills Development Working Group of the BRICS Council in South Africa hosted the skills challenge.
Hundreds of participants aged between 18 and 35 from BRICS countries, namely Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, pitted their skills against one another to develop solutions for various challenges in various fields.
The initiative is open to students and tech-savvy young people from the BRICS nations. CGTN’s Anastacia Waweru filed this report.
WATCH: BRICS Future skills challenge
Gaositwe Pule is a project manager at South Africa’s Human Settlements Department, overseeing housing needs and urban development.
Pule has joined the Brics Future Skills Challenge and is tasked with bringing a simple design that embraces the green economy to life.
“We’re given a 2D challenge, and then we have to draw, respect, model it into 3D and then quantify it as well as calculate your energy efficiency, which is your solar panel contribution to the house,” said Pule.
The initiative has brought some of the finest tech minds together from Brazil, Russia, India,China and South Africa. The aim is to find digital solutions to global challenges and equip young people with critical skills.
“What we put out there for them was for them to come and present what the future would look like in terms of sustaining us through issues that are affecting energy, issues that are affecting health and water,” said chairperson, South African Chapter, Brics Business Council, Busi Mabuza.
“But then they needed to utilize technologies that could be ported to other BRICS nations if it were, so that we open up trade opportunities for them as well.”
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Face off time
Brazil, Russia and India competed online, while South Africa and China are faced off on the ground.
“It’s not only a competition, but actually it’s something like a communication between different countries,” explained Guo Shiyu, Competitor & Robotics Teacher, in China.
“And as a competitor, I hope that I can learn from other competitors and also have some deeper understanding of this leading technology. And also, we hope that we can learn something that can be useful or contribute to our country’s development,” said Guo.
South Africa is confident the collaboration can help address the critical skills gap which is keeping young people out of the job market.
“Even if young people are not in employment, what we do recognize is that they come with innate skills that they can use. So what we bring as a working group from the BRICS Business Council is that hope to provide them that opportunity to present what they have, that we can uplift and they can use that to make something different and something better for themselves.,” said Mabuza.
“In China, we already set up 84 training bases. We hope these training bases become the Brics United training base. We hope that South Africa and other Brics countries can join in this work,” Chairperson, Brics Business Council China, Skills Development Working Group Dr Liu Zhenying explained.
The fourth industrial revolution is driving the digitization of the global economy and giving rise to new industries, which Brics countries are well positioned for.
*Anastacia Waweru is a CGTN reporter
*CGTN is a BGTN reporter
