Ten years after Kenya first entered the Huawei ICT Competition, four university students finally brought home the trophy that had eluded the country since it joined the contest in 2019. And on Tuesday, President William Ruto made sure the achievement got its due at the State House.
Ruto honored Kenya’s winning teams from the 2026 Global Huawei ICT Competition at a ceremony in Nairobi. Telling attendees that the students’ international success underscores Kenya’s rise as a continental tech hub. Reinforces the country’s commitment to competing in the future global digital economy. The recognition capped a competition season that saw all three of Kenya’s university teams reach the global finals in Shenzhen, China. A clean sweep of qualification that culminated, for the first time in the country’s history with the contest, in the tournament’s top honor.
Kenya’s cloud track team, Kevin Tuei of Tharaka University, Catherine Atieno of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT), Brian Ngugi Kamau of Mt. Kenya University, and Salem Kim Lumumba of Machakos University, captured the Grand Prize in the competition’s Cloud Track, Kenya’s first top honor since joining the competition in 2019. The team beat out competition from a field that included 131 elite teams representing more than 40 countries and regions at the Shenzhen finals, drawn from a record-breaking pool of more than 220,000 student participants worldwide across national and regional qualifying rounds.
Kenya’s network track team added a Second Prize finish to the country’s overall haul, while an all-female computing team from JKUAT, Joan Kinoti, Faith Mosonik and Melanie Minayo, all fourth-year computer science students, claimed both Second Prize in the Computing Track and the competition’s prestigious Women in Tech Award, competing against leading global universities in software engineering, algorithms and systems design. The finals, held June 2 to June 5 in Shenzhen, wrapped alongside Huawei’s AI Accelerating Education Transformation Summit.
Ruto used the ceremony to credit the results to a longer institutional relationship rather than a single competition cycle, praising Huawei for what he described as nearly three decades of partnership with Kenya. He highlighted the company’s ICT Academy program specifically, noting that it has partnered with 61 institutions across the country, trained more than 15,000 students, certified over 6,000 learners, and equipped more than 400 lecturers with internationally recognized digital skills. Infrastructure Ruto framed as the foundation that made Tuesday’s Grand Prize possible rather than a one-off stroke of luck.
Gavin Gao, chief executive officer of Huawei Kenya, returned the compliment, praising the Kenyan government for making technology a national priority and describing the company’s ongoing partnership with the country as central to nurturing globally competitive digital talent. The Huawei ICT Competition itself, launched in 2015, has grown into one of the largest university-level technology contests in the world, spanning tracks in cloud computing, networking, computing and Ascend AI, and drawing participants from more than 100 countries this year alone.
Kenya’s Grand Prize win lands within a period of accelerating Chinese tech investment and digital-skills partnership across the country. Huawei has operated in Kenya for close to three decades, and the ICT Academy model is behind Tuesday’s win. Pairing Chinese corporate training resources directly with local universities has increasingly become a template Chinese firms apply elsewhere on the continent, echoing the vocational training partnerships that have expanded in Tanzania and the mining-sector skills programs recently highlighted in Zimbabwe.
The win also arrives amid a broader wave of China-Kenya economic activity this year. Nairobi hosted the 11th China Trade Week just days before the ceremony, drawing more than 200 exhibitors focused on energy, fintech and technology cooperation aligned with Kenya’s Vision 2030 development blueprint, while China’s zero-tariff policy for African exports has been credited with driving sharp freight growth on the country’s Chinese-built Standard Gauge Railway. Diplomatic ties between the two countries date to 1963, among China’s longer-standing African partnerships, and Kenyan officials have increasingly framed digital skills development. Alongside infrastructure and trade, as a pillar of the country’s push to build a genuinely diversified, technology-driven economy.
For the seven students who traveled to Shenzhen and came home with a historic first-place trophy, though, Tuesday’s ceremony was less about the broader diplomatic picture and more about a simple, decade-long wait finally ending. Proof, as Ruto put it, that Kenya’s digital talent can now compete, and win, on the biggest stage the field has to offer.
