Opportunities and Challenges of Online BDL Trainings: A Case Study of NIWIIT

• By Oluwatosin Mayor-Olabiyitan and Oluwafemi Awopegba

Executive Summary

Digital skills have emerged as one of the most promising solutions to youth unemployment. It is required for wage employment and the establishment of a personal business in today’s world. Evidences from this policy brief revealed that many young people and women have limited access to basic digital infrastructure such as computers, stable electricity, and internet facilities for digital skill-up trainings.

Hence, international and local efforts toward digital skills training for youths and women need to be increased. There are several channels the government uses to intervene in digital skills provision, particularly for young graduates and women aiming to enter the labor market.

One of the many channels in Nigeria is the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) platform which serves as a broad-based channel for digital skilling for youths from all parts of the country, thus promoting inclusion. The following are the recommendations to bridge the skill gap and promote young people and women’s participation in digital skill training programs.

1. Private initiatives should collaborate with existing government structures to promote widespread digital skilling for youths and women, in particular.
2. Lifelong training programs with institutional support for basic digital infrastructure should be available to promote young people and women’s participation in digital skill training.

Background

The Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector has grown, and there is an increasing demand for workers with professional and practical ICT skills and a high level of education. Furthermore, the widespread use of ICT in all economic activities has increased the demand for e-skills for ICT professionals and workers in other occupations.

Digital skills are one of the new demands for the workforce as the importance of digital technologies in the economy grows. As digital skills are unequally distributed, and women with low education are among the most disadvantaged social groups, this represents new challenges for gender equality.

Regarding gender equality, the expansion of the ICT sector has been viewed as an opportunity to improve women’s labor-force participation. According to Garrido et al., 2009, ICT skills are seen as an asset for improving the employability of disadvantaged people, especially women.

Gender inequality persists in the ICT sector in the same way as in the rest of the labor market, where deskilled and unstable ICT-related jobs are mainly occupied by women (Castaño, 2005; Webster, 2006). These expectations stem from increased job openings and highly regarded work in this industry.

Furthermore, because this sector requires communication skills, which are considered a female asset, it is anticipated that the ICT sector would provide women with more opportunities and equality in the labor market (Webster, 2006; Wooldfield, 2000). However, these expectations have not been met for several reasons.

Challenges with digital skilling among women

First, digital skills entail more than data and word processing capabilities. It is also more than an information search on the internet. It includes various skills such as computational thinking, app development, transcribing, content creation, editing, cognitive functioning, and digital media literacy. Several studies have recorded a low level of digital competence among women.

Findings from a Double You Digital Skill initiative study revealed that about 20% of the youth claimed to have intermediate knowledge of digital skills. Adeoye et al., 2017 revealed that most undergraduate and graduate students in Nigeria use the internet mainly to source information relating to their course of study.

Research has shown that women are less interested in learning essential digital skills that can prepare them for the future of work than their male counterparts. For instance, an assessment of the interest in digital skills across the male and female gender revealed that 4.54% of the males were interested in Microsoft Excel.

In contrast, none of the females was interested in Microsoft Excel. The results showed that 18.18% of the males were interested in Corel Draw, while no females were interested in Corel Draw (Patience et al., 2021). Another significant challenge for digital skilling among women is the timing of training.

Women are usually stuck with the responsibility of domestic and caring issues; for this reason, it seems very difficult to have the full commitment of women to participate in digital skill training programs.

Opportunities associated with digital skilling among women

As aforementioned, young people and women have a decent chance to gain improved livelihoods by actively participating in the digital economy, hence the importance of digital skills upskilling. In Nigeria, the government uses notable entry points to intervene in digital skills provision, particularly for young graduate women teeming to enter the labor market.

The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) program is a prime example. The NYSC program serves as a great platform to re-orientate graduate students, especially women, regarding the benefits of participating in digital skill programs.

In particular, the skill acquisition and entrepreneurship department (SAED) of the NYSC serves as a capacity-building platform for youth to acquire skills needed for the future of work. Moreover, the SAED department is responsible for facilitating the training and mentoring of 100,000 young graduates in skill acquisition and entrepreneurship development for self-reliance annually.

In essence, the government has a considerable role in bridging the skill gap and promoting women’s participation in digital skill training groups to improve the digital economy with more equality.

Besides government efforts, a few private initiatives in Nigeria were created to help close the skills gap and promote women’s participation in digital skill training.

One of those is the Nigerian Women in Information Technology (NIWIIT), the foremost industry association for women in the technology industry in Nigeria, which aims to support, develop, recognize, and promote the achievements of women in the technology industries via relevant events, mentoring, programs, awards, and networks.

One of the many objectives of NIWIIT is the creation of awareness programs for IT-related services and products among women in the rural and suburban areas in Nigeria, especially students in secondary schools and tertiary institutions.

According to the association’s president, the NIWIIT seeks to address youth employment through locally adapted courses with a strong focus on empowering girls with digital skills. The NIWIIT Digital Skill-up digital literacy program, designed by Technology for Social Change and Development Initiative (Tech4Dev), is one of such courses.

It is an essential digital literacy (BDL) program designed to bridge the gender and digital skill gap by delivering relevant and applicable digital skills to female NYSC members in Lagos State. This memo seeks to uncover the opportunity and challenges associated with such training programs based on the program’s outcomes.

Findings

Opportunities through the NIWIIT Digital Skill-Up program

A significant opportunity that NIWIIT-Tech4Dev Basic Digital Literacy (BDL) training offers, in collaboration with the NYSC, is its broad coverage in reaching the youth population prime for the labor market. Universities and Polytechnics in Nigeria produce about 500,000 graduates every year, most of whom proceed to do the compulsory NYSC program. Therefore, the NIWIIT-Tech4Dev BDL training targeted at female youth corps is an excellent opportunity to equip these graduates with the much-needed lifelong digital skill for the future of work.

More opportunities are uncovered as the NIWIIT-Tech4Dev BDL training data findings are inspected more closely. About 1,541 female NYSC Lagos state corp members registered for the program. The training was predominantly self-paced and delivered using the Microsoft Digital Nigeria Platform. Thus, it was possible to train corp members in massive numbers. After all, 72% of the participants indicated that they had never had any digital literacy training before. By implication, this effort could have been cascaded across all 36 other states in Nigeria to have a landslide impact.

An essential strength of the training program can be attributed to its inclusivity. Despite the training being domiciled in Lagos state and for Lagos state corp members alone, most of the participants hailed from 32 of the 37 states in Nigeria, which complements the integrated approach of the NYSC. About 16% of the participants were from rural areas. This can be seen as a positive sign, given the poor reach of digital infrastructure in rural areas (ref). More so, about 48% of the respondents came from non-STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) backgrounds. This presents another opportunity for women familiar with technology to catch up with their peers in technology-related disciplines.

Challenges faced in the NIWIIT Digital Skill-Up program

Despite the opportunities that come with such BDL trainings, there are also challenges. Access to a computer, stable electricity, and internet facilities are standard prerequisites for digital skill-up trainings, yet access to such facilities for digitally excluded groups is difficult. Although a majority (52%) of those registered claimed to have access to a computer daily, about 48% said they did have access to a computer at least once a week or less. Moreover, most participants only have internet access once a week or less. It is also unsurprising that many may need more institutional support to complete online self-paced trainings.

Furthermore, findings from the training program reveal that beneficiaries were not responsive and, in some cases, used learning platforms that were not directed by the training providers. Ultimately, the training program encountered massive drop-out rates from registration to completion. After registration, participants were asked to fill in a baseline form. Only 58.2% of the participants completed the baseline survey, while only 11% completed the endline survey. By graduation and certification, only 6% of the beneficiaries could be identified as qualified for a certificate. These outcomes are a little surprising given the lack of a comprehensive framework for monitoring and evaluation of the training program as well as the inherent weaknesses of self-paced training concerning student management.

Conclusion

This policy brief revealed the opportunities and challenges with the NIWIIT-Tech4Dev BDL training targeted at female youth corps. The findings show that the NIWIIT-Tech4Dev digital skill training provides a feasible pathway to equip young people and women with the much-needed lifelong digital skill for the future of work, therefore to reach more significant numbers of female graduates across the country, similar initiatives can be replicated in other states.

In addition, the results revealed that most participants lacked frequent access to computers and the internet. Thus, there is a need for policy to seek ways to provide access to digital infrastructure to promote young people’s and women’s participation in digital skill training.

The lessons from the opportunities and challenges of the NIWIIT-Tech4Dev BDL training can help enhance the preparedness of public and private organizations and partnership for the provision of digital skills training that will promote decent jobs for youths in Nigeria.

References

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• Castaño, C., (2005). Las Mujeres Y Las Tecnologías de La Información: Internet y La Trama de Nuestra Vida. Madrid: Alianza.
• Garrido, M., Rissolai, G., Rastrelli, M., Diaz, A. and Ruíz, J.A., 2009. Immigrant Women, E-Skills, and Employability in Europe: The Case of Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, and Spain. Washington: Technology & Social Change Group (TASCHA), University of Washington (accessed 20 May 2015) https://digital.lib.washington.edu/xmlui/handle/1773/16288
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• Webster, J., (2006). Women in Traditional and Newly Emerging Jobs in the European Service Economy: Working Conditions, Technology, and Corporate Strategies. Labour & Industry: A Journal of the Social and Economic Relations of Work 16 (3): 59–72.
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