Addressing the digital learning-to-earning gap
Simple human-centred design techniques can improve digital livelihoods interventions for forcibly displaced communities.
By Karim Bin-Humam, Digital Skills and Livelihoods Consultant
There’s a lot of buzz in the humanitarian community surrounding the potential for digital platforms to facilitate improved livelihoods for forcibly displaced people around the world. And no wonder.
Digital platforms are transforming the nature of work and income generation for everyone. From remote employment facilitated by online collaboration tools to microwork and gigwork marketplaces, the opportunities to make or supplement a living using digital tools are broad and varied. Those working with and for refugees are right to consider the digital economy a source of opportunity — especially given the case for economic inclusion and the documented challenges faced by the displaced when it comes to seeking employment.
UNHCR’s new Digital Transformation Strategy (2022–2026) provides a vision for how UNHCR can leverage the transformative nature of digital technology to better meet the needs of forcibly displaced and stateless communities. The first of the strategy’s three priority outcome areas, Digital Inclusion, includes equitable access to and ability to leverage technology to participate in the growing global digital economy. An evidence-based approach to innovation in this space can offer a means to iteratively experiment, learn, and apply lessons.
An initial wave of enthusiastic experimentation with digital-enabled livelihood programming has already begun to yield a mix of results and learning opportunities. One phenomenon that has emerged is the learning-to-earning gap. Here, we look to unpack this concept and put forward some practical recommendations to account for it in programme design using simple human-centred design methodologies.
The learning-to-earning gap: A design flaw?
When reviewing a number of past, current, and proposed future digital-enabled livelihoods initiatives implemented by UNHCR and partners, patterns begin to emerge. One is that many such initiatives are based on an assumed learning-to-earning journey. For an individual project, this journey might be conceived as follows:
This journey assumes a series of seamless transitions but, more often than not, the learning segments of this journey do not lead smoothly to the earning component. This learning-to-earning gap is increasingly mentioned in literature reviewing digital livelihoods pilots. As IREX notes, in “From Learning to Earning”:
The myth of a seamless, singular path into work can create unrealistic expectations.
Often, the theories of change guiding these interventions don’t account for the complexity of the challenge at hand. Sometimes, they contain huge assumptions and leaps of logic. In its review of such pilot initiatives, the German Marshall Fund identifies the need to set realistic, attainable targets, and to be more discerning about imparting not just any digital skills but the right ones — specifically, skills that equip the displaced participants to compete in the digital economy.
Diagnosing underlying drivers
What drives the learning-to-earning gap? There’s no single culprit across initiatives. Refugee communities are diverse and the challenges they face along the learning-to-earning journey are as varied as their contexts. In fact, not accounting for this diversity is one of the explanations for the gap (more on that later). Others include:
- Irrelevance of training to the desired income-earning opportunity: We all know there are two sides to the labour market: supply and demand. If trainings delivered to the target community don’t impart them with the skills needed in the specific labour market they have access to, the initiative won’t ensure their competitiveness in that market.
- Lack of engagement with the demand side of the market: Engaging with the labour market to understand what providers of employment, gigs, and freelancing opportunities are looking for can help to bridge the learning-to-earning gap. Without this engagement and labour market research, we can’t know whether programmes are meeting the needs of the market. Working with trade associations, employer networks, public employment services and ministries of labour, and using data and information from labour market observatories or reports on in-demand skills on specific digital platforms can help inform relevant training programmes.
- Lack of coaching/mentorship: People engaging in the gig economy for the first time need a lot more than simply digital or technical skills. Particularly in the case of self-paced, online training programmes, a lack of personalized attention and coaching can lead to people giving up when they don’t know where to turn for answers, help, or advice. Having experienced mentors or coaches, who are specialized in the field, can help to instil confidence and resilience. Mentors can be employment coaches or alumni of digital employment programmes who have successfully found sustainable income-generating opportunities in the digital economy.
- Overlooking soft skills, employability, or entrepreneurial skills training: Too often programmes overlook the need for employability support to be provided alongside digital and technical skills training. A person’s ability to find online work opportunities can be limited by their capacity to effectively market themselves. Key skills include resume and portfolio building, networking, interviewing skills, and negotiation techniques, among others.
To show how some of these factors can contribute to the learning-to-earning gap, let’s first create a general learning-to-earning framework for the digital economy based on a few common elements across programmes. (NB: These ideas do not reflect official UNHCR positions or frameworks. They are related to emerging findings from the Innovation Service’s PROSPECTS project on Refugee Inclusion in the Digital Economy.)
Now let’s take a look at how four different people might experience a breakdown in the journey for very different reasons:
In addition to the myriad ways in which the journey can break down for different individuals, it is also prudent to note that the actual journey isn’t necessarily as linear as the above graphic would imply. Different people may have different starting points, while others might move laterally through the journey — for instance, a person who is already earning an income can still engage in training and skill development to open a parallel journey for themselves.
What can we do about this gap?
The challenge is multi-dimensional, and its causes are context specific. But an excellent place to start is with our target “users” themselves. When practitioners design a product, service, or project of any kind that serves to promote the livelihoods of forcibly displaced people, we would do well to recognize that one size doesn’t fit all.
UNHCR’s Age, Gender and Diversity Policy aims to ensure programmes account for the inclusion of various groups by engaging directly with them to understand their needs and building on their experiences. When it comes to digital-enabled livelihoods, there are many specific facets of diversity we must be aware of to design effective programmes. These include education levels, sector-specific skills and qualifications, language knowledge, digital literacy and fluency, and more.
One person may have an advanced university degree, another may have not completed primary education. One might be looking to engage in full time work, another might need the flexibility to engage in intermittent work, to balance income generation with other priorities. One might have the skills to develop complex software architectures, while another might be versed in social media, and another still might not have had much experience with digital platforms at all. We need to know who we are designing an intervention for.
A single solution will never be able to cater perfectly to everyone, but, through deliberate research and engagement with a target community, we can begin to uncover threads of commonality. These can be used to create personas to guide solution design and ensure decisions reflect the lived reality of those the initiative aims to help.
The persona: A fundamental tool of design thinking
An essential element of human-centred design processes, personas are fictional characters that represent groups of people who will use your product or service. For the purposes of humanitarian work in digital-enabled livelihoods, a persona could represent a person whom we aim to provide with training, guidance, or job-matching services. The data used to create a persona is based on community engagement and research.
For more on what a persona is and how to create one, you can check out resources online. Here, we’re specifically concerned with the persona as a tool to help anchor sound design decisions and avoid downstream pitfalls (including learning-to-earning gap).
Some examples of the use of personas in digital-focused humanitarian interventions can be found in UNHCR’s Connecting with Confidence: Managing Digital Risks to Refugee Connectivity report. Those personas focused on how refugees access digital platforms and services.
Using personas to design digital livelihoods interventions could enable practitioners to make more informed decisions and challenge our design assumptions as we map out learning-to-earning journeys.
For example, the evidence-based information on Grace, above, could be useful to determine multiple aspects of the design of a relevant training programme for young women.
Knowing she has access to computers only via a computer lab, and that she has child care duties, might lead us to conclude that to facilitate skill development we should offer child-care services during training sessions at a local community centre. We might also conclude that it is necessary to engage with the demand side of the market to understand their specific needs, and perhaps facilitate a work-learning experience designed for young mothers to facilitate a transition to autonomous freelancing. Any number of additional design considerations could be drawn from this persona.
Using personas in alignment with best practices can help us to assess our development process constantly and consistently, creating focus, coherence, and preempting downstream challenges.
Personas: Promising practices
- Determine the right scope for your persona(s): A persona can be broad or narrow in scope, focusing on high level generalities or on more specific dimensions. Front of mind should be the question: “what are these personas for?” If you’re creating personas to design an effective digital livelihoods project, the scope of the personas is best limited to the aspects and dimensions directly related to that project’s goals and context.
- Create personas from real data when possible: Ensure the personas you use are based on people who actually exist. Only by doing so can you ensure the design decisions you make are addressing real needs experienced by real people. Data can be collected through myriad methods, including desk research, surveys, community workshops, interviews, and so on.
- Limit the personas you design for: It’s OK to create multiple personas, but remember that no project can deliver everything to everyone well. So, even if you decide to create as many as five personas, choose one or two as your focal points — and make those profiles the target population(s) of your intervention. This will limit the urge to dilute the value of your solution by trying to meet the needs of everyone at once.
- Link personas to other human-centred design tools: Personas are only one of many human-centred design tools. Others, like user stories, user journeys, and journey maps — can prove extremely useful, as well. Personas often form the linchpin of user-centred design methods, so you’ll want to create those first. Basing a user journey on a specific persona, for example, ensures the journey and the design decision made at its various stages stay true to the needs and experiences of real people.
- Refer back to people and personas consistently: If you’re not referring back to your persona(s) regularly when making design and implementation decisions, you’re not making the most of them. As you continue to design and implement, you will learn more about the personas and need to update them — that’s all part of the process! Your persona(s) can and should be iterative. Applying learnings and adapting personas and methods throughout the project on the basis of consistent engagement and feedback from the target community will help ensure that an initial unknown doesn’t scupper the whole initiative.
In summary, human-centred design methods like the humble persona can be incredibly useful in developing effective humanitarian projects, because they ensure we consistently place the needs and perspectives of the user at the centre of our decision making processes. In doing so, we can create solutions that are better tailored to specific needs and more likely to account for lived experiences with which we ourselves might not be familiar.
Whether using them to select the right digital platforms for a livelihoods project or to develop an effective digital skills training programme, personas can address emerging challenges and ensure more accountability to affected populations.
Explore human-centred design resources, learn more about UNHCR’s Digital Innovation Programme, and access UNHCR’s Digital Transformation Strategy.
