Federal Minister for IT and Telecommunication Shaza Fatima Khawaja said more than 200,000 trainings have now been completed under the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Ministry of IT and Telecommunication (MoITT) and Huawei, with 50,000 of those completed by school-going students who have finished various certifications under the programme. The MoU, signed following Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s visit to China, has run through the Federal Directorate of Education (FDE) across Islamabad Model Schools and Colleges, with the broader initiative originally targeting between 200,000 and 300,000 young Pakistanis for IT and advanced technology training. Khawaja shared the update after visiting schools in Islamabad, where she met young girls from Grades 7 to 12 who had each completed around 16 different courses and multiple certifications under the programme.
Khawaja said the girls had gone beyond the basic courses designed for school students, completing higher-level modules as well, and described being especially struck by their excitement and confidence as they spoke about what they had learned. She said the visit highlighted why investing in young people, and ensuring girls specifically have every opportunity to learn, grow, and lead in technology, matters so much, framing the milestone within the broader Girls in ICT push the ministry has promoted. The training programme itself began with a mandatory foundational “AI Basics” module for students in Grades 6 to 10 before expanding into additional courses covering areas such as 5G, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, data analysis, and network security, delivered through the Huawei Talent platform.
The programme has evolved considerably since its initial announcement, with early government messaging citing figures ranging from 200,000 to 300,000 trainees and splitting the cohort between roughly 150,000 to 240,000 receiving basic IT training and a smaller group, around 50,000 to 60,000, receiving higher-level, high-tech training in fields like AI, cloud computing, cybersecurity, and big data. The 50,000 school-going students Khawaja cited appears to track closely with that higher-tier cohort figure, suggesting a meaningful share of the programme’s advanced training slots have gone specifically to students still in the K-12 system rather than university-level participants. Khawaja thanked Federal Directorate of Education Director General Riffat Jabeen and the FDE team, along with the Huawei Pakistan team and her own ministry staff, for making the milestone possible.
The update adds a concrete completion figure to a programme that has been rolled out in phases since Huawei and the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training first launched ICT training for Islamabad Model Schools students in 2025, alongside a parallel Huawei-run ICT Training Portal the Ministry of IT launched to extend access more broadly. With Khawaja describing the current cohort’s success as only the beginning of their journey in technology, the practical significance of the 200,000-trainings milestone will likely be measured by how many of these certified students go on to pursue further technical education or employment in Pakistan’s IT sector, particularly given the government’s stated goal of using youth training as a lever for both job creation and the country’s broader digital economy ambitions.
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