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Why Digital Skills Really Matter for ICT4D Projects – Your Weekend Long Reads

By Steve Vosloo on February 10, 2018

digital skills in ict4d

In an increasingly online world, people need digital skills to work and live productively. One of the major barriers to digital uptake is a lack of these skills.

Across Africa, seven in ten people who don’t use the Internet say they just don’t know how to use it. This is not only a developing country problem: in the European Union 44% of the population have low and 19% have no (19%) digital skills!

It’s is no surprise, therefore, that the theme for this year’s UNESCO Mobile Learning Week is “Skills for a connected world”. (It runs from 26-30 March in Paris – don’t miss it!)

Global Target for Digital Skills

At Davos last month, the UN Broadband Commission set global broadband targets to bring online the 3.8 billion people not yet connected to the Internet. Goal 4 is that by 2025: 60% of youth and adults should have achieved at least a minimum level of proficiency in sustainable digital skills.

I’m not quite sure what the difference is between digital skills and sustainable digital skills, but having a target such as this is good for focusing global efforts towards skilling up.

The Spectrum of Digital Skills

Digital skills is a broad term. While definitions vary, the Broadband Commission report proposes seeing digital skills and competences on a spectrum, including: 

  • Basic functional digital skills, which allow users to access and conduct basic operations on digital technologies;
  • Generic digital skills, which include using digital technologies in meaningful and beneficial ways, such as content creation and online collaboration; and
  • Higher-level skills, which mean using digital technology in empowering and transformative ways, for example for software development. These skills include 21st century skills and critical digital literacies.

Beyond skills, digital competences include awareness and attitudes concerning technology use. Most of the people served in ICT4D projects fall into the first and second categories. Understanding where your users are and need to be is important, and a spectrum lens helps in that exercise.

Why Skills Really Matter

Beyond the global stats, goals and definitions, and its contribution to SDG4, why should you really care about the digital skills of your users, other than that they know enough to navigate your IVR menu or your app?

The answers come from the GSMA’s recent pilot evaluation of its Mobile Internet Skills Training Toolkit (MISTT), implemented last year in Rwanda.

Over 300 sales agents from Tigo, the mobile network operator, were trained on MISTT, and they in turn trained over 83,000 customers. The evaluation found that MISTT training:

  • Gives users confidence and helps them overcome the belief that “the Internet is not for me”;
  • Has the potential to help customers move beyond application “islands” — and get them using more applications/services;
  • Has a ripple effect, as customers are training other people on what they have learned (a study in Cape Town also found this); and
  • Increased data usage among trained customers, which led to increased data revenues for Tigo.

In short, more digital skills (beyond just what you need from your users) presents the opportunity for increased engagement, higher numbers of users and, if services are paid-for or data drives revenue, greater earnings. Now those are compelling ICT4D motivators.

Skills as Strategy

Therefore, we need to see skills development as one of the core components of our:

  • Product development strategy (leveraging users who can interact more deeply with features);
  • Growth strategy (leveraging users who train and recruit other users);
  • Revenue strategy (leveraging users who click, share, and maybe even buy).

But what about the cost, you might wonder? As Alex Smith of the GSMA points out, with the data revenues, for Tigo the MISTT pilot returned the investment within a month and saw an ROI of 240% within a quarter. That’s for a mobile operator – it would be fascinating to measure ROI for non-profits.

Also check out the Mobile Information Literacy Curriculum from TASCHA, as is the older GSMA Mobile Literacy Toolkit.

Image: CC by Lau Rey

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Written by
Steve Vosloo is passionate about using technology in education. He's worked at UNESCO, Pearson South Africa, Stanford University, and the Shuttleworth Foundation on the use of mobile phones for literacy development, how technology can better serve low-skilled users, and the role of digital media for youth. All opinions expressed in this post are his own.
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