Promoting digital literacy as an essential life skill for women’s empowerment

• By Oluwatosin Mayor-Olabiyitan, Gladys Ehindola and Oluwafemi Awopegba

Executive Summary

Acquisition of digital literacy is a critical addition to women’s life skills in their journey to becoming confident in navigating today’s digital economy. With digital literacy in the 21st century, women stand a chance at getting decent employment opportunities and taking ownership of their responsibilities and how to better execute them.

Findings from this memo suggest that exposure to a 2-week intermediate digital literacy program can transform women’s ability to overcome challenges related to digital illiteracy.

These findings show that they can create jobs for themselves and everyone else with a digital skill qualification. Regardless of their educational standing and backgrounds, women stand a chance at telling beautiful stories of how exposure to digital literacy help to make better future decisions.

This conclusion emphasizes the need for policymakers to drive the following:

• Sound advocacy, especially in the area of empowerment towards grooming women to become empowered through digital literacy.
• Commitment among females to keep striving to take up opportunities that result from the acquisition of digital literacy

A digitally literate woman not only has more chances at making it to international markets but at doing better at their jobs and coping with any demands she encounters. That said, a digitally inclusive society can exist if women can take up digital literacy as a critical life skill.

Background

Women worldwide are yet to fully adopt digital literacy as a vital element of life skills. Implementing digital literacy as a value addition can enable women to surmount various challenges linked with learning to know, combat competition, take action, and generally be in control of one’s life (Delors et al., 1996; Delors, 2013). This allows women to stay ahead through the use of digital platforms.

Nowadays, the ability to read, write and process information using technologies is considered a life skill (Bawden, 2001). As the digital era further unfolds, women are expected to learn new skills to interpret new forms of information and motivate effective decisions regarding life issues.

In his book, Gilbert (2006) defines digital literacy as having the understanding of how to comprehend data from a wide variety of sources when presented via computers. He further notes that digital literacy becomes a life skill when introduced as ideas and mindsets, skills and attributes, or as a “knowledge assembly.” Another defines life skills as a set of human skills acquired via teaching or direct experience beneficial to navigate the digital world and problems encountered in daily human life (Dudhade, 2014; Roscoe et al., 2021)

Life Skills Education is an approach to fostering long-term human empowerment. It enables women to avoid unfavorable life outcomes such as unemployment, life stressors, and unrealistic family expectations. These unfavorable life outcomes can put off women’s interest levels in acquiring digital education, further subjecting them to exclusion.

The world is becoming digitalized every day, and for women to lead a fulfilled life, they should have access to digital literacy to hone skills needed for their professional and personal lives.

A blog post by Skillroads writes on the life of working and “breadwinner” mothers using digital literacy to compensate for employment gaps when looking for a new job or as transferable skills gained from time past as a parent, which can be leveraged professionally. Women have prospects of shaping their overall life potentials by acquiring digital literacy to increase their chances of getting hired or their opportunities to escape exclusion.

Boosting their life’s ambition by acquiring digital literacy skills can facilitate the degree to which women are empowered in a digitally inclined world. Equally, women can use digital technologies to address notions of the digital divide, which has been a long-standing challenge, even in wealthy nations, according to author Heidi Julien (2015).

Evidence

Digital literacy is one of the vital life skills for women. One of the many ways women can add to their life skills is by acquiring digital skills. Technology for Social Change and Development Initiative (Tech4Dev), a non-profit social enterprise, seeks to create access to decent work and entrepreneurship opportunities and platforms for women through digital skills empowerment and advocacy. The Women Techsters Bootcamp is one of the flagship programs of Tech4Dev. The Bootcamp is a two weeks virtual learning program to equip women with skills to build tech careers and tech-enabled businesses.

The women Techsters Bootcamp program aims to equip women with digital skills across various learning tracks, such as Product design, cybersecurity, data science, product management, and software development. The women Techsters Bootcamp program often starts with an application call. Then there is a selection process, program onboarding, baseline survey assessment, training, end-line survey assessment, and finally, documentation of success stories from the beneficiaries.

Applicants not chosen for one cohort are urged to apply for the following one, as the program runs various cohorts. Using the women Techsters Bootcamp cohort 2.2 as a case study, over 5000 women applied to the cohort, and 1085 women were accepted into the cohort.

In investigating the importance of digital literacy as an essential life skill, we uncover the reasons or motivations behind the women choosing to enroll in Bootcamp. Here are a few of the answers given by the women when asked why they chose to enroll in the boot camp program. “Everything is going digital, and most things are done in a digital way; tech is interesting at the same time challenging. I have always liked to explore it” and “To gain the skill to further develop myself for a future career.”

When asked about the extent to which the applicants’ work requires a digital skill, more than a quarter (28%) agreed that their work required a digital skill, and only a few of the women (8%) responded that their work did not require a digital skill. Thus, digital skill is essential in seeking employment and enabling these women to continue performing their tasks at the workplace.

Although the Bootcamp program lasted for only two weeks, there were immediate success stories from 67 women beneficiaries of the Bootcamp program. This suggests that women could benefit from digital skill training programs, no matter how short. The post-training survey conducted to document the success stories among the participants revealed that the women had a great time learning during the training.

Here are a few responses from the participants regarding participants experience in training. “It was not easy as a nursing mother, but resilience, grit, and a growth mindset kept me going, “I love every aspect of the training. Our instructor made it easy for me from what I learned. I can do something with it for my future.

Other comments from the respondents detailing the training’s successes showed that the program assisted women in choosing their professional path and opened doors for job opportunities. “The training gave me the opportunity to get my product design career started” “Yes. I shared in an interview that I was learning product management, which was an added advantage. I was hired” “Yes, I just applied for a junior role in product design and I am hopeful I will be considered” “Yes, it has. I’ve been working on getting an internship role, and so far, it’s been great”.

Conclusion

Findings from the Bootcamp 2.2 program showed that many women, despite all odds, want to increase their digital literacy in order to gain more significant influence. This is clear from the various factors that encouraged the women to submit applications and maintain their commitment to the training program.

Many women applied to the training program to advance their professions or obtain jobs. Women’s participation in various developmental activities benefits their social and economic prospects. For women to gain from such developmental activities as digital skill training, they must also be self-motivated.

Women are expected to be digitally competent to fit into the labor market due to the world’s increasing digitalization and the need for digital skills in the workplace. Therefore, women must develop digital skills as part of their life skills to feel empowered and meet the expectations of the job market.

References

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