Boosting digital skills through Digital Transformation Centres (DTCs)

Despite unprecedented progress in technological development across the globe, the digital divide persists with almost half the population remaining offline and slowing growth rates in Internet uptake. Among those excluded from the digital world are populations living in rural and underserved communities, low-income households, women and girls and other marginalized groups. As access to digital services increases and the cost of access decreases, lack of digital skills is becoming one of the greatest barriers to digital inclusion, particularly for people at the bottom of the social pyramid in developing countries. In addition, the business sector (including SMEs and start-ups) often lacks employees with the necessary digital skills to become successful in an increasing digital economy. Despite the existence of several targeted digital education and skills policies and programmes, the skills gap remains persistent and is even growing in view of the growth of the technology sector and the demand for a digitally skilled workforce across all other sectors.
It is against this background that ITU and Cisco launched the Digital Transformation Centres (DTC) Initiative in September 2019. The objective of the Initiative is to support countries develop digital skills mainly at basic and intermediate level and particularly in the underserved communities. The capacity to scale and to deliver digital skills training to a large number of citizens is a core objective of the Initiative.
This project supports the activities implemented under the DTC Initiative. In particular, it supports activities aimed at scaling the delivery of digital skills training – and hence digital literacy - in local communities and among marginalized groups. While a major focus of the project is to support the DTC activities in Ghana, it will also support the rolling out of the Initiative at large during its pilot phase (covering nine countries) and leading into the second phase (expanding the number of countries). At the end of the project, in the beneficiary countries there will be a substantial increase in the number of people trained on basic and intermediate digital skills equipping them with job-ready skills that help them progress in the professional life, as well as young entrepreneurs trained with digital and entrepreneurship skills.