Digital Skills
Poor digital skills deepen existing inequalities and financial exclusion, especially in the global digitalized economy. Digital skills are needed to seize the benefits of digital transformation and protect oneself from imminent threats related to digital services.
With digital skills, people can enhance their livelihoods in ways that go beyond financial capacities, enabling them to support their lifecycle transitions and live healthier and more productive lives as employees or entrepreneurs.
Around the globe, particularly in the least developed countries (LDCs), many lack the aptitude to access and use digital services. Equipping individuals, at the ‘last mile’ with the essential knowledge and digital skills to access and have the agency to use digital innovations is critical for an inclusive digital transformation.
Leveraging its extensive on-the-ground presence, UNCDF brings together public and private ecosystem partners to build digital and financial skills, particularly those of youth, women, refugees, migrants, farmers and micro, small and medium-sized enterprise (MSME) owners in LDCs.
This entails developing digital and workforce skills content as well as support services. This combination of content and support is important so that people can develop their knowledge and feel empowered to cultivate new digital behaviours.
The Skills workstream is one of the four workstreams of the UNCDF strategy to workstream to address the development challenges related to financial and digital skills and build Inclusive Digital Economies.
Collaboration with public and private partners to build digital and financial skills in diverse groups: youth, women, refugees, migrants, farmers, and MSME owners in LDCs.
Development of digital and workforce skills content along with support services to empower individuals and foster the adoption of new digital behaviors.
The Skills workstream is a key component of UNCDF's strategy to address development challenges, focusing on financial and digital skills to promote inclusive digital economies.
This shift also impacts how we learn, access information and essential services, from finance to healthcare.
As of 2022, the ITU data shows that around 66% of the world’s population, i.e., 5.3 billion people, are online. The same data reveals that 32% of people within a mobile broadband coverage area are not using internet.
UNCDF has developed a wide array of toolkits that emphasize the integration of digital skills with financial education, creating digital financial literacy resources. We highlight these toolkits below.
Our aim is to share these toolkits with partners so that they can be utilized, adapted, and integrated into their own programs. We envision these toolkits to have a broader impact, benefiting a wider audience.
Although these toolkits are tailored to specific contexts, they are designed in a way that allows for easy adaptation, making them highly versatile and suitable for various settings.
If you find any of these resources useful or need further information or wish to adapt them, do not hesitate to reach out.
We are excited to collaborate and expand the impact of these valuable learnings and toolkits, as they hold immense potential to benefit diverse communities in various contexts.
UNCDF welcomes your support, and seeks ways to collaborate and expand the impact of these valuable toolkits, as they hold immense potential to benefit diverse communities in various contexts.
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