Youth Empowerment through Digital Literacy and Career Preparedness: How Egyptian Youth Accessed Training and Career Guidance Despite the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: Preventing learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic by supporting digital learning opportunities and career guidance for marginalized girls/youth in Egypt

Proposal

This session will present key objectives, successes/achievements, and key innovations in order to prepare Egyptian youth for future jobs, and help both learners and teachers pivot to adapt to the “new normal” of distance teaching and learning imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The project is implemented through a private/public partnership between Microsoft and Care Egypt, and the Egyptian government represented by the Ministry of Youth, the Ministry of Communication.
The project focuses on empowering the Egyptian youth by building their skills like digital literacy, digital marketing, coding, Microsoft 365, as well as a wide range of courses. The project’s strategies/activities aim to prepare Egyptian youth to increase their employability, career shift as well as increasing their entrepreneurship/freelancing chances. The approaches also include the provision of special courses to increase teachers’ government officials and students’ digital skills in order to allow them to be able to implement/join online learning platforms.
One major success was that the fostering of digital skills helped to pivot the project’s implementation approach and to reach more learners during the pandemic. The project is already noting some success through some of the trained youth being able to secure decent jobs [or to make career shifts] both in rural and urban areas by getting jobs such as in sales, web developing and digital marketing. In 2020-2021, the project was able to reach more than 800,000 youth and provided learning opportunities and career guidance for over 380,000 youth as part of the “learning tracks” initiative jointly launched with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) . The project was able to secure employment opportunities for more than 3,500 youth. This new initiative emerged in response to changes occurring in the local labor market as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic which affected employment and availability of job opportunities. Through studying market needs, the initiative identified the most in-demand jobs within the labor market and focused training and support for young people targeted by the initiative in three specialized educational tracks: software development, sales, and e-marketing. Through these tracks, trainees have been able to build skills essential for rewarding careers, beginning with foundational learning followed by support in finding internship opportunities in major companies.
A Training of Trainers (TOT) program has been implemented to enable MCIT trainers to develop skills needed to effectively deliver each track using an experiential learning approach and a variety of assessments to track and measure the impact of these tracks on young people. Tracks are then provided on a larger scale through training the initiative’s trainers in different areas of specialization.

Author

• Areeg Hegazi, Care Egypt Foundation