DS4JI explores the results impact of digital skilling and reskilling of young women in Township and Rural areas
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The Digital Skills for Jobs and Income (DS4JI) project conducted a site visit to two of their implementing partners of non-formal digital skills training initiatives in the Eastern Cape, and Cape Town. The project undertakes monitoring and evaluation site visits to conduct physical verification of the partner’s reporting, collect impact stories from beneficiaries and communicate the results impact on DS4JI's areas of intervention with its implementing partners.
On the 10 October 2022, the DS4JI team met with the programme coordinators and group of facilitators from Edunova, together with a group of young girls from Township and rural areas, from East London and Queenstown. This was followed by the next site visit in Cape Town, which took place on 14 October 2022. The team met with the Africa Women Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum’s (AWIEF) CEO Irene Ochem and her technical staff.
GIZ (DS4JI) provided technical guidance on improving the implementation of GIZ-supported measures, M&E reporting, and data quality standards to Edunova and AWIEF. The two programmes provide different digital skills, to upskill/reskill young women.
Edunova has enrolled 254 young women under the EdTechPreneur course. Learners who complete the course will graduate with an NQF Level 5 National Certificate in Systems Development, preparing them for the level-entry developer and IT support careers. The young women are also placed in local schools as IT Enablers, providing IT support, supporting schools’ e-learning, and establishing coding clubs in their local communities. The course is a self-paced course, spanning over 18 months. Some learners have completed the course and others will complete by 15 November 2022.
AWIEF enrolled 60 young women in a 12-week AWS re/Start Cloud Practitioner training, which provides scenario-based exercises, labs, and coursework. Students learn how to build coding, networking, security, and database skills. A total of 36 young women have successfully completed and will be receiving the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification, enabling them to pursue entry-level cloud operations careers. Unfortunately, 24 young females dropped out of the programme.
DS4JI plans on conducting a tracer studies 6 months post programme implementation on both those that successfully complete the programme as well as the drop-offs for all training beneficiaries.
The training programmes seek to provide opportunities for young women to secure interviews, improve employment prospects and freelancing/business opportunities in the digital economy.
By conducting these site visits to the various implementors of the non-formal training initiatives for DS4JI, the M&E and the project team get an opportunity to interact with the beneficiaries to collect further data that assists the project to gain lessons learnt in implementation.
For more information, please consult DS4JI’s “Faces and Stories” campaign which provides more details on some of the beneficiaries: where they are and what they achieved since enrolling in the training programmes – this campaign provides a deep dive intel by sharing the success stories of the young women whose employment prospects have improved.