It's noteworthy that five African girls were preparing to jet off to China courtesy of the Huawei-She Leads Africa Fellowship at the same time South Africa's Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa and Huawei's executive board director Jason Li met up.

Ramaphosa and Li discussed the construction of ICT infrastructure and the development of talent in South Africa during a meeting at the company's headquarters in Shenzhen today.

Huawei's Nigeria based media affairs manager Chenyu Li has emphasised how important Africa has become ahead of Ramaphosa's visit to the Chinese telecommunications firm's headquarters.

"Africa is the future, everybody is talking this way right? Africa has a big population, resources and talented people...we are expecting to work with some emerging companies."

Li mentioned several other initiatives that they support, such as the 1000 Girls ICT training program in Nigeria, and said the young benefactors are happy and have not been distracted by any of the political antipathy that is sometimes directed at Chinese companies.

"We are a company that have headquarters in China but we never identify ourselves as a chinese company. We are actually an international company and our team are international."

"Employment is very important in Africa and we are trying to encourage young people to be employed. So I think this program and other programmes are trying to create more job opportunities either of being employed by Huawei. We are trying to encourage them to create job opportunities for themselves." Li added.

The assistance provided by Huawei is most needed according Huawei-She Leads Africa Fellows Danielle Reid whose tech innovation Sterio.me has already garnered support from Lesotho's Ministry of Education, Lesotho Teachers Trade Union and the Vodacom Foundation in that country.

"I think there are a lot of ideas that can be transferred across cultures, in addition for us it's really interesting whether there will be any telecommunications partners that we might pick up there (in China). At the moment there is high level penetration in Africa in general however if we got a great partnership with a company that was producing the phones at a low cost that would be an extra incentive for us to scale up from there."

Huawei committed to providing training for one thousand ICT professionals in South Africa over the next five years in a statement that followed Ramaphosa's visit to Shenzhen.