Digital Skills and Economic Opportunity for Girls and Women : Part II
What specific digital skills advance women’s and girls’ economic empowerment? How can digital skills development practitioners assess and determine what specific digital skills are needed and where to focus their energies? This is especially critical as practitioners seek to integrate digital literacy into a comprehensive digital skills development programme design. Digital literacy is a critical component and a foundational building block to expand the use of digital skills and the promotion of digital technology to advance economic growth for girls and women in LMICs.
Digital skills development practitioners should have the specific vision, focus and relevant tools to promote digital literacy in development programming, supporting girls and women on their digital inclusion journey. They should do this by assessing local needs, strengthening local digital ecosystems, and by increasing local capacity through targeted digital skills training programmes (please refer to the section ‘Resources to Explore: Toolkits’ in Part III of this report for some toolkit examples and guidance for designing digital skills programming to advance education and economic opportunity for girls and women).
A critical part of digital skills development is understanding and assessing the core digital competencies required for girls’ and women’s economic empowerment. This is important so that they are fully able to benefit from digital-based learning, training, and skills development, as well as the utilisation of digital tools and services to be economically empowered.
For the many women and girls whose employment opportunities are likely to lie outside of salaried jobs and formal employment, training interventions that help maximise the opportunities they have in their own environments and in sectors which have been identified as important to national development are likely to be most successful. Training in areas such as entrepreneurship, digital literacy, financial management and marketing are all beneficial but are more impactful when women are then supported on an ongoing basis by coaches and the wider community. In terms of skills development, studies suggest that the skills which will be in demand in the future are those relating to STEM subjects including digital fluency and the ability to perform abstract and analytical tasks, and socio-emotional skills that robots cannot perform such as communication, teamwork, leadership and entrepreneurship. Future skills-focused programmes must pay close consideration to these factors and focus activity on interventions which will prepare girls and women for the industries of the future. They must also help governments and businesses diversify their workforces to help tackle the continued risk of losing out on the diversity dividend.
Additionally, digital skills development practitioners should consider that digital literacy supports and advances local development goals in a sustainable manner, informing national-level country development strategies, advocacy and policy development, forming the basis for future government-sponsored programming and initiatives that advance women’s economic participation, further reducing the digital gender divide. Therefore, another aspect of the practitioner’s investigation and engagement with the digital skills development process is an examination of the local country context through exploration of government strategic development goals, direct engagement with government stakeholders regarding digital literacy programme focus and investments, as well as through direct investigation of the local digital ecosystem.
Digital Skills Feature Profile: Girls in Tech Indonesia
Advancing Women’s Digital Skills and Economic Empowerment through Girls in Tech Indonesia
Overview and Objectives: Girls in Tech Indonesia is an international organisation that provides digital skills and digital literacy training, coaching and mentoring to women to develop their entrepreneurial ideas as well as establish and grow their businesses. Girls in Tech is global with multiple chapters around the world and has more than 70,000 embers.
Challenges: Girls in Tech notes that the main barrier to women advancing economically and specifically in the digital services sector is due to the “digital gender divide caused by the cultural divide,” meaning the gender inequity found in some contexts.
In direct response to these challenges, Girls in Tech have designed specific women’s economic empowerment programming that seeks to increase digital skills knowledge. They also aim to raise awareness of gender issues overall and specific to digital-related services, as well as provide digital literacy skills and increase women’s leadership opportunities.
Impact: To date, over 4,000 entrepreneurs have been funded, mentored and supported with training; over 49,000 participants have benefited from hackathons, solving local and global problems; and over 75,000 participants have had access to digital skills courses, coding bootcamps, as well as design and training sessions.[1]
Key Approaches, Methods & Tools Used: Digital skills and digital literacy training (as well as leadership courses that focus on digital for business, social context, finance and marketing), promotional convening events, coaching, and peer mentoring through community-building have all been used to successful advance women’s economic empowerment.
Featured Digital Skills Assessment & Training Development Toolkit
DigComp 2.2 — The Digital Competence Framework for Citizens
In 2013, the European Commission developed DigComp, the Digital Competence Framework for Citizens[1], which is a very rich toolkit and an important reference for digital skills programme design, to offer benchmarks for measuring digital skills globally given the rapid pace of new technological developments in our world today. In 2016, the EC released an updated version, DigComp 2.0, which adjusted and expanded the original DigComp framework to better reflect certain new digital skills needed. DigComp provides a common understanding of key digital skill and digital literacy competencies — broken down into five broad categories of information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, digital content creation, safety and problem-solving and provides a wealth of informational and evaluation frameworks that correspond to each competency area and use assessment instruments to define proficiency levels.
The DigComp 2.2 Framework
The DigComp 2.2 framework provides over 200 examples of knowledge, skills and information that help individuals engage with existing digital technologies as well as emerging ones. In terms of any programme design that involves digital skills assessment, design and delivery, DigComp 2.2 is an essential tool to guide the development process from the initial assessments to identify competency levels. It can also inform the development of specific scope and sequences for digital training, skills certifications and other learning and workforce development training products, specifically designed for girls and women. It’s also important to note that the DigComp 2.2 Digital Competence Framework has been validated by a wide range of stakeholders that include the EU, ILO, UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank.
UN Women Advancing Digital for Women’s Economic Empowerment Programming
UN Women, the Government of Liberia and Orange Foundation are seeking ways to promote digital gender equity in Liberia through women’s empowerment programmes.
Following a capacity building training in 2022, 70 women have gained employment with Orange as agents, 700 more benefit from remote digital training support and mobile money accounts and more than 800 women and youth are supported with digital-based agricultural advisory services.
Learn more: UN Women Digital Empowerment
INITIATIVES ADVANCING GIRLS’ AND WOMEN’S ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT
Girl’s Digital Empowerment Platform: Girl Effect
Girl Effect is a non-profit organisation and digital promotional platform that produces educational media to promote digital inclusion and inclusive education and also highlights key social and health issues that impact girls and women in their daily lives.[2] It is important to note that digital skills and digital literacy training are not the only elements of a successful strategy to impact the digital gender divide, appropriate social behaviour communications campaigns, educational media and peer exchange platforms are also critical to advancing positive impact and sustainable change.
Learn more: https://girleffect.org/
Inclusive Education Feature Profile: Skills for Prosperity Brazil
In Brazil, English is a social marker — it shows privilege. Although S4P was designed as a programme to support English language teaching, it was clear early on that English can help with equitable education, to be a tool to fight structural inequality in Brazil. The programme has had a transformative approach to GESI, enabling discussions in the education system to be not only about increasing the quality of education and English language teaching, but also a way in which to discuss racism and equity in Brazil.[3] During COVID-19, the programme faced a challenge of how to access teachers and students with newly produced digital English language materials. They realised that a digital version could not reach all of the target students. Many students in rural areas, even in Sao Paulo State, were unable to access the internet and had to be sent physical copies of school materials. However, through the programme, teachers from marginalised communities were able to make use of online training by attending community centres with internet access and some teachers even travelled by boat to reach students in rural areas. Brazilian English language teachers went above and beyond to overcome the growing digital divide for Brazilian students in rural areas, with support from S4P partner NGOs.
Digital Skills Feature Profile: Equals Global Partnership
The EQUALS Global Partnership for Gender Equality in the Digital Age is a committed group of corporate leaders, governments, businesses, not-for-profit organisations, academic institutions, NGOs and community groups around the world dedicated to promoting gender balance in the technology sector by championing equality of access, skills development and career opportunities for all. The ITU (International Telecommunication Union) and UN Women are two of the Founders of The Equals Global Partnership which runs the EQUALS Digital Skills Hub, a one-stop shop for information on projects, resources and good practices to advance digital skills education for women and girls and bridge gender digital skills divide.[4]
Footnotes
[1] https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC128415
[2] https://girleffect.org/who-we-are/
[3] Brazil ‘Lessons Learnt’ Conference. March 2023
About the author
Scott Isbrandt, MA is a Senior Technical Advisor for Digital Solutions at Palladium. He has worked extensively in emerging economies to enhance digital skills programming, designing and developing tech solutions to advance education and economic empowerment initiatives.
This report has been funded with UK aid from the UK government.
DISCLAIMER
The views expressed in this report are those of the authors. They do not represent those of Palladium International or of any of the individuals and organisations referred to in the report.
LICENCE
This is an Open Access report, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
