Digital Skills and Economic Opportunity for Girls and Women : Part III
VOICES FROM THE FIELD
Two digital skills and digital literacy development practitioners share their perspectives on what works, challenges that they often see and their views on the future of digital skills programming designed to empower girls and women.
A Closer Look at Digital Skills Training in Action:
A conversation with Ms. Constantine Obuya, Executive Director, African Centre for Women, Information and Communications Technology (ACWICT) and a delivery partner for Skills for Prosperity in Kenya.
Please tell us about yourself and your organisation.
I am one of the founding directors of ACWICT and have been working with the organisation for close to 20 years now. Our mandate is to advance access for women and youth to ICTs to promote sustainable development. We focus mainly on women from marginalised and underserved communities. We also work with women farmers, for instance, looking at how they can take advantage of digital technology to promote or improve their farm production and therefore also improve their food security. It’s been very successful because agriculture, as you know, is the economy, the backbone of the economy of Kenya. We’ve been working with women to ensure that they are able to increase production of their farm products, access markets and be able to not only secure food security, but also secure their livelihoods. Better livelihoods through the sales of the farm products that they generate have been something that we have been doing over the years.
Tell us about your interest in digital skills and how you see the application of technology advancing learning and training for young women and youth.
We really saw the power of distance learning and digital skills training emerge during COVID-19. In an effort to control the spread of the pandemic, people were not allowed to meet in big groups. We ran a training programme that had a number of girls in our training centres and then all of a sudden, the sanctions were in place, and you had to stay at home. But during that period, we were able to continue our training. We very quickly had a conversation with technology companies, came up with a virtual training platform and continued providing young women with digital skills that actually enabled them to secure employment and online work during the most difficult COVID-19 period. We’re proud of the work that we did within the digital employability sector, providing young women and families with economic opportunities during that difficult time. Our gratitude goes out to the UK government’s Digital Access Programme and Microsoft for their support.
Can you give an overview of the Skills for Prosperity Programme in Kenya?
The Skills for Prosperity Programme with ACWICT was implemented in Turkana Country in Kenya in 2023. Turkana County is one of the largest and most marginalised counties in Kenya. The Skills for Prosperity Programme sought to train 400 young women and equip them with digital skills. One specific skill training was in solar alternative energy that connected them to employment opportunities. That was the goal of the project — to provide 400 young women with foundational digital skills and solar energy skills and then connect them to jobs and livelihoods. At the end of the enrolment period, we ended up with around 513 girls due to the popularity of the programme. The digital skills programme focused on digital literacy, financial literacy, entrepreneurship, also some soft skills around adaptability, as well as digital freelancing. Within the digital freelancing programme, we looked at different learning components that were really market-driven and that could be able to support them in securing employment. For us, the ultimate goal here was not just training for the sake of training, but also ensuring that the skills that you are giving these young women would be able to help them secure employment.
The other thing that we also look into is childcare for young mothers. A young mother wants to be very sure of the safety of their child while she goes for training. If she’s not in a position to afford that baby care back at home, then it will just mean that she will not show up for the training. So, we integrated childcare into the programme to ensure that retention. So, in the end, out of the 513 girls that enrolled, we had 503 completions, which was slightly over 98%. After the Skills for Prosperity Programme, young women found work in online administrative support and local ICT-related jobs, one was employed in a local hospital and others went into digital marketing (about 90 of them worked in digital marketing) as well as entrepreneurial income generating activities.
The critical lesson learned for us during the implementation of the Skills for Programme was that for women’s and girl’s economic empowerment to be successful, you need to focus on the skills that they can acquire in the short-term — high-impact and market-driven skills that can provide them livelihood opportunities in the shortest time possible. Then we have to also look at skills that are able to lay out a career path for them so that there’s a skills pathway that they pick up longer term, providing them with a pathway for growth.
A Closer Look at Digital Education for Universities — Online Education in Action
A conversation with Dr. Fereshte Goshtasbpour, Lecturer in Online Teaching, Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University
Please tell us about yourself, your organisation and your work in Kenya with Digital Education.
I am a lecturer at the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University. We are one of the two institutes within The Open University. Our work covers pedagogy, research, and also quality assurance for all other faculties and departments. It’s one of the largest universities in Europe with 2.3 million students and 3,000 staff members. We are also one of the larger academic institutions that provide higher education to students with learning disabilities. Our academic practice specialises in distance and online education. For the Skills for Prosperity Programme, we led the higher education component and trained public university staff in digital education in Kenya. Digital education for that project included both online and blended learning.
The initial plan for the Skills for Prosperity programme was to work with the government of Kenya in order to help them establish the National Open University of Kenya. But then the pandemic happened and the budget and the priorities for the government of Kenya changed. That’s why the focus from helping them to establish an Open University of Kenya changed to the capacity building of university staff. They then decided if we have this pool of trained staff in digital education, then the government can use the trained staff to support the future establishment of the National Open University of Kenya.
The project took two and a half years and during this time, we offered two programmes to all 37 public universities in Kenya. For 29 of those universities, we offered a baseline training, which was a fully online course. It included eight sessions of asynchronous learning and was supported by an online community of practice, with some wrap-around webinars and technical and academic support. Based on the Ministry of Education’s request, we offered specialised bespoke digital training to eight selected universities. We co-designed the digital education training based on their university priorities, and we mentored them in designing, piloting and then rolling out those digital education projects.
Can you give an overview of the Skills for Prosperity Programme in Kenya?
At the inception phase of the Skills for Prosperity Programme in Kenya, we conducted a very comprehensive digital skills needs assessment using the Digital and Information Literacy Framework to identify the digital literacy and digital skills gaps. We also interviewed the Vice-Chancellors of some universities to say, okay, what would you like your staff to get out of this training? Further, we consulted with Ministry of Education officials and also the Commission for University Education, which is a quality assurance body in Kenya. Basically, through these comprehensive needs assessments, we determined the main objectives of this project, which were to improve the staff’s digital skills and digital literacy for digital education programming. Based on that overarching goal, we identified learning outcomes and then based on those learning outcomes, we developed the courses for them through a co-creation and co-design development process.
We collaborated with eight universities and had 24 co-design workshops to make sure that we identified the right content and that it was based on their needs. The main challenge that we encountered was that we were supposed to offer this course in a blended way, but because of COVID-19, we had to offer it fully online with very unreliable internet connectivity which was a big challenge. One of the other challenges was a negative attitude toward online learning. You always had early adopters who are very keen, but generally, the initial view was — we’re just doing it for COVID-19 and after COVID-19 we’ll go back to the classroom. Having said that, we had a 79% course completion rate, which was particularly good for our first programme, which was the baseline programme. A year after that I went back and checked on those trained and asked, okay, how are you getting along? What are you doing? It was so impressive to hear what they’ve done since they completed the digital education course.
The Open University (OU), Skills for Prosperity Kenya (SFPK), Digital Education for Universities: Online Education provides broad training to strengthen strategies and develop skills and capabilities for delivering quality digital (online and blended) university education. The course is designed for university educators, educational leaders and production and support teams in Kenya.
Tell us about your interest in digital skills and open education resources and how you see the application of technology and Open Education Resources (OERs) advancing learning and training.
Basically, this is the mission of The Open University. It’s not just that we have the ‘open’ in our name. We are open to everything. We are open admission. We don’t have any entry requirements. As much as our policies allow, we have a lot of our resources openly available to others because we are one of the main pioneers of digital education and online learning in the UK and in Europe. We have two platforms, OpenLearn and OpenLearn Create, with thousands of different open courses. That’s how we approach learning and teaching. We make everything openly available. Basically, if we didn’t base our work on open educational resources (OERs), we wouldn’t have been able to shift objectives from establishing the National Open University of Kenya to capacity building within two months. I’m very happy about the results of this project. Basically, by providing OERs, we modelled good online pedagogy with Kenyan Universities. They took our course and trained their staff, but they localised it again based on their specific needs. They’ve got their own badges and certificates that they added to the course content.
How can digital skills and OERs create digital education opportunities for women in Kenyan Universities?
That’s a very good question and quite a difficult one to answer. This was one of our main objectives — to provide opportunities to mainly female learners and learners with disabilities. It was one of the key criteria for Kenyan Universities to nominate their team members receiving the digital education training. Unfortunately, we didn’t get very high levels of women participating from the university staff (due to the existing gender imbalances as most faculty were male-dominated). However, we did have a lot of female learners involved. We design, with the user, projects that are about building capacity and improving personal or organisational development — it starts from there even before the use of OERs. It’s about who you choose to develop the OERs, and who you choose to give the opportunity to come and manage these projects or get involved in the development process.
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
The Skills for Prosperity Programme has made innovative advancements that clearly demonstrate how skills development programming is critical to advancing economic opportunity and sustainable development for all. Digital skills are an integral part of solution design when thinking about the future of economic opportunity. Advancing girls’ and women’s economic empowerment will require comprehensive digital skills and digital literacy assessments that lead to responsive training and skills programme design based on local needs and local market opportunities. Programme investments in the future for digital skills development programmes will need to be strategic, focused, and promote training as well as practical work experience through apprenticeships and job placements in partnership with local public and private sector actors. The need is great for many LMICs and there is more work to be done.
Many digital skills development practitioners believe that promoting the development of digital skills is a critical necessity that is a prerequisite to further advance the overall goal of girls’ and women’s educational attainment, leading to economic empowerment, workforce opportunities, and the advancement of increased civic engagement and economic success.
Resources to Explore: Toolkits and Guidance for Designing Digital Skills Programming to Advance Education and Economic Opportunity for Girls and Women
There are many digital skills and digital literacy resources, toolkits and guidance to draw upon to design and develop programming to advance education and economic opportunity for girls and women. A small sample of these freely available resources are cited below. It is important to leverage existing tools and transform digital solutions and platforms that can be used in all contexts (including offline), are easy to maintain and can be used in geographic locations with irregular connectivity and unreliable electrical supply.
World Bank: Engendering ICT Toolkit
https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/digitaldevelopment/brief/engendering-ict-toolkit
GSMA: Mobile Internet Skills Training Toolkit
https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/mistt/
GSMA: Tech4Girls Resources
https://www.gsma.com/tech4girls/resources-page/
Digital Skill-building by Design: The EdTech Integration Strategy Toolkit
https://edtech.worlded.org/digital-skill-building-by-design-the-edtech-integration-strategy-toolkit/
World Bank: A Global Study on Digital Capabilities
https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/digitaldevelopment/brief/a-global-study-on-digital-capabilities
The Digital Competence Framework for Citizens Developed by the European Commission (DigComp Framework 2.2):
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC128415/JRC128415_01.pdf
Open University Digital Framework Toolkit
ITU Digital Skills Toolkit
https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Digital-Inclusion/Documents/ITU%20Digital%20Skills%20Toolkit.pdf
mEducation Alliance & Alison: Free Online Certificate Courses on Global Digital Literacy
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/).
