Digi-Women Initiative Narrows Digital Literacy Gap For Nigeria’s Women

“Today, women run less than 5% of technology businesses and less than 10% of the global technology workforce are women. We created the Digi-Women Initiative to address the huge gap in digital literacy for women, bridge the digital divide and empower women to contribute to the digital economy,” says Opeoluwa Ashimi, CEO of Promane and Promade Limited, a business optimization firm in Nigeria funding the Initiative with matching grants and support from Nigeria’s Retail Giants Academy a social enterprise aiming to train 100,000 unemployed youth by 2030, She Learns Here NGO, empowering women’s digital skills and Equals Digital Skills Fund managed by Cape Town Science Center on behalf of GIZ.

Some $12 trillion could be added to global GDP by 2025 by advancing women’s equality a 2015 report by McKinsey & Company found. But closing the gender gap requires public, private, and social sectors’ actions. Ashimi wants Digi-Women Initiative to contribute to this global shift by training 300 women by the year’s end. All three Stages of the Initiative’s digital up-skilling workshops are free and include basic digital literacy, setting up eCommerce stores, and digital marketing including web design, and social media marketing and management.

In late June, 100 rural Nigerian women, ages 20-45, graduated from Stage 1-Basic Literacy course and can now open an email account, create a Facebook page and WhatsApp. With in-person trainings, held at training centers, the Stage 1 workshop was led by Promane and Promade Limited staff that met on a daily basis and engaged in hands-on experiential learning with the women cohorts since it was “necessary for the first time digital learners.” Women participants were provided meals, logistics support for transport to and from the workshop sites, smart phones and matched with digital jobs in their communities–their progress and employment will be monitored.

Ashimi hopes to scale the initiative across West Africa and Africa at large, “if our impact justifies the funds and time invested.” 

Digitally Up-skilled Women Are Nigeria’s Future

“The Digi-Women Initiative focuses more on the return on invested dollars per woman which we expect to be about 308% in additional income generated after one year of training on digital skills for digital enterprise and digital jobs.”

Ashimi explains why cohort selection criteria for the first two stages focused on semi-literate rural women in Nigeria; reversing the standard digital literacy programs’ focus from young girls to mothers and women to help digital literacy trickle down to their children.

Investing and supporting the younger generations’ digital development is critical, especially since girls face “disproportionate societal impediments.” Digital up-skilling of women has a direct impact in removing the home and societal barriers to digital skills for the girl child; digital literate mothers become strong advocates for their girl child creating a ripple effect. Also, digital literacy improves family incomes, trade and job opportunities for the mother.

The program received such overwhelming response — 227.3% response above the number of expected applicants from rural Nigerian women wanting to enroll in the Initiative that there is now a waitlist for additional workshops to be created with additional funding sought for a second phase.

Some 150 women will be trained by Retail Giants Academy in the Initiative’s Stage 2 eCommerce Stores set-up. This will empower rural women with prior trading history and micro-businesses to set up e-Stores on eCommerce sites and marketplaces. Women-led businesses with a “history of trade in non-perishable products” and no prior online experience, are ideal candidates.

“E-Commerce stores open up new markets to entrepreneurs beyond their local reach or physical stores. Digi-Women entrepreneurs are listed on e-Commerce marketplaces for the first time for access to larger markets beyond their communities. We expect this to increase their annual sales by at least 50% in the first year following training,” Ashimi explains how Digi-Women entrepreneurs who are first-time users of online payment channels used Retail Giants’ own Stocker App, an online marketplace that includes online payments. 

For Digi-Women who didn’t have bank accounts, partnering with Lagos-based First City Monument Bank Ltd (FCMB) banking group committed to accelerating SMEs and personal business accounts, allowed financial inclusion of the rural women. The bank also offered the entrepreneurs financing incentives specific to women entrepreneurs and their e-Marketplace.

Up to 50 women will be selected for the Initiative’s Stage 3, Digital Marketing workshop supported by She Learns Here Initiative, a UNIDO and HP-life endorsed non-profit focused on digital skills empowerment with over 2,200 workshops and training programs. Cohorts would need “some level of tertiary education and prior basic digital literacy skills,” explains Ashimi.

“For Digital Marketing workshop cohorts, we prioritized the unemployed graduates of universities, polytechnics and technical colleges–between 23 to 40 years-old,” Ashimi explains how the more intensive workshop includes online training for two weeks with additional mentoring provided by She Learns Here Initiative to the top students.

While graduates of Stage 1 were matched with rural digital jobs and their progress and employment are being monitored, graduates of the eCommerce stage are expected to be self-sustained, after the initial on-boarding support launch onto online marketplaces of FCMB and Retail Giant’s StockerApp. Digital Marketing workshop graduates will be matched with at least 10 Digi-Women Entrepreneurs, to provide social media and digital marketing support services as part of their action learning course work, which Ashimi hopes will provide the graduates’ client management skills and a portfolio of work for future job opportunities. Top performing students will have job opportunities as virtual assistants, social media managers and website designers–provided by She Learns Here Initiative and mentored for three months post-graduation to secure full-time paid employment.

To determine the full impact of the Digi-Women Initiative, Ashimi and her team will track the increased income levels of all the graduates as their core impact measurement for one year. Digi-Women Initiative will closely monitor and measure the impact of the training to determine how women-led businesses transformed, improved earning potential and income.

“We hope to scale Digi-Women Initiative across West Africa and Africa at large. This will require more funding, diverse trainers (e.g., French and Portuguese speaking trainers), partnerships in different geographies and more cohorts. Our curriculum will be adapted to the needs of the beneficiaries, focusing on digital skills for rural women in the geography of interest,” Ashimi says the curriculum will evolve to include basic, intermediate, senior and advanced classes with a wide range of digital literacy courses for internet literacy, digital commerce, digital marketing and advanced digital literacy for business analytics, including data visualization using Microsoft excel and power bi.

Forging partnerships with organizations that could also provide training tools, marketplaces, digital payments, software solutions and funding will help accelerate the closing of the gender-based digital divide gap in Nigeria and across Africa.