DigiVerse

Inspiring and equipping adolescent girls and young women with digital capabilities for learning and earning through access to safe, advanced, and quality immersive digital learning experiences

“If we are going to see real development in the world, our best investment is WOMEN”. This statement by Desmond Tutu reflects how we must prioritize the empowerment of women everywhere. Unfortunately, the COVID -19 pandemic has set back years worth of work on bridging gender inequality and now exacerbating a gender digital divide. According to research conducted by the United Nations Agency for Tech; the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), “...hardly any progress has been made towards gender parity in digital access and usage over the last three years”. As the digitization of economies expands, economic and social growth will increasingly depend upon people’s ability to use technology, therefore, we cannot continue to exclude girls and women from the digital world, particularly girls and women in underserved communities. Globally, almost one billion girls (i.e. 65% of all girls and young women under 24) lack basic digital skills and when it comes to digital skills, available data indicates that girls and women are less likely than men to have advanced digital skills. In Nigeria for example, girls and women account for 49.47% of the country's population but unfortunately, women make up only 20% of the total number of people working in the ICT sector. Similarly, women represent only 22% of those graduating from university in Engineering or Technology. The low percentage of women engaged in STEM sectors highlights missed opportunities, especially when it is estimated that 90% of jobs in the formal sector in the next ten years will require technology skills and knowledge. Without increased digital adoption and use, adolescent girls and young women, particularly those in marginalized communities will have little or no access to quality digital learning experience, fewer employment opportunities and will face additional barriers to workforce participation. As a result, it is critical to develop tailored and definitive digital skills training programs for women and girls in order to open new avenues of learning and bridge the gender digital divide.

In order to advance digital skills and capabilities in underserved communities, particularly for girls and women, radical solutions must be deployed. Using VR technology, DigiVerse turns carefully curated digital skills development training content into a simulation of an inspiring and immersive learning environment that ensures that girls and women are not only equipped with 21st century skills through hands-on training but are inspired and excited to learn using such advanced technology. Leveraging emerging research output in the field of digital development, our learning curriculum is adapted from the Internet Skills Scale developed by the Oxford internet institute in collaboration with the London School of Economics as a framework which ensures that every single girl who goes through the program develops high proficiency across the 5 digital skills scale including operational, information navigation, social, creative and mobile skill. Our learner-centred curriculum enables us to improve beneficiaries' digital capabilities, equipping them with relevant digital skills required to leverage digital technologies for learning and acquiring in demand and market relevant skills to increase their economic productivity. For girls and women in underserved communities, a huge problem can always be not being able to envision a life for themselves beyond the 4 walls of their community. If a girl in a slum could never have the chance of being in an MIT classroom, who’s to say we cannot bring MIT to her?  Hence, the deployment of VR technology in these communities can help to increase exposure, the attention span and learning rate of the students as well as help them dream beyond the possible while gaining quality digital skills to help facilitate their participation in today's world. Our solution is contextually deployed in-school and out of school to address the needs of girls and young women who are not in education, employment or training. 

Our solution currently serves two demographics of underserved people; adolescent girls from low-income homes aged 12-18 enrolled in formal education and young women in marginalised communities usually not in education, employment or training. These demographics of people have overtime being overlooked and not given priority in digital development program planning and hence remain unconnected to today's digitally connected society. While working with communities we have had cases where mothers would ask to take the son instead or demand money to take the daughter for our learning sessions as her domestic tasks would be left undone. While girls and women still remain underrepresented, there is no denying the power that they have in ensuring the homes are fed and that communities continue to thrive. Our solutions seek to ensure that they can see themselves as human beings capable of taking their lives into their own hands, capable of excelling in classrooms despite school-based gender disparity. Improving on our solution model to include entrepreneurship and deliver lessons with VR came as a result of understanding that for girls who have had to see far more than anyone should ever experience in a lifetime, their education literally has to come to life, to reach deep into their minds and plant a seed of hope of what their future could possibly be.

As the team lead, I have spent the last six years leading and supporting innovative programs to improve digital inclusion for women and girls across Africa and Asia while promoting girls participation in STEM-related activities. In my role as a Youth Envoy with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), I provide insights on achieving a connected future for all, sit with relevant stakeholders in government and telecommunications to advance investment towards #digitalconnectivity, #girlsinICT and #generationconnect. As one of the 6 voices of youth creators and part of the first ever youth group at the ITU plenipotentiary Conference, I have a mandate to ensure that government bodies and representatives continue to work towards digital connectivity for all and ensuring they do so with adolescent girls and youth in focus. 

Leveraging our combined experience in driving inclusive digital development in Nigeria across three domains of impact including access, skills and connectivity, my team and I are best positioned to deliver on this project. Having piloted our solution across 10 schools in the last 12 months, We have the technical expertise and contextual understanding to not only deliver this solution but also scale the impact through the support provided by the MIT Solve. 

We have been working with host communities and target beneficiaries to design and increase the context-appropriateness of our solution from ideation through testing to the first pilot. Over the last 2 years, my team and I have conducted rigorous surveys in the communities we currently serve, understanding the people beyond our target group, learning how the target group relates with their environment and the impact that has on their overall learning outcome. We have hosted focus group discussions with mothers and elders of some of these communities to better understand their stance when it comes to girls' education, digital access and social inclusion. As part of our development practice, we adopted the fundamental principles of human-centred design and were able to co-create the learning curriculum with our target beneficiaries, taking into account everyone's individual experiences, research and ideas to create a more digitally equitable world. 

Although we have been pushed back repeatedly because of cultural differences, we have found ways to keep working with our audience and strengthen intercultural relations without undermining the culture and beliefs of our host communities. Within our community of practice that includes representatives of host communities, target beneficiaries, learning facilitators and school administrators, we have spent time outside of the classroom to get to understand our demographic, their family and local context and this is one of the reasons that informed the need to revamp our current curriculum for better impact. 

The innovativeness of our solution extends beyond the use of digital technology. From adopting research-based frameworks to using a spark-interest approach to inspire and equip adolescent girls and young women with digital capabilities, our solution brings a unique and innovative methodology to bridging the gender digital divide. Most significantly, our solution uses VR to provide a unique learning environment, creating an immersive learning experience for learners. The introduction of VR technology as a learning tool does not only have an effect on the students but also helps the elders in the community see what their daughters are also capable of. 

Furthermore, as our research has proven, the Use of VR technology in marginalised contexts and low-income communities goes beyond using exciting technology to teach but reaching into the deep subconscious of our target audience and helping them overcome the psychological trauma of the life they've had to live and showing them a world of possibilities different from the one they have been saddled with. While most of the existing interventions leveraging VR to promote digital skills development focus heavily on using VR technology to improve digital competencies, we are incorporating an entrepreneurship crash course into our delivery to help our beneficiaries access opportunities to upscale their products or services for those that are choosing the entrepreneur route. 

Over the next year, we plan to reach 2,000 girls and young women across 10 states in Nigeria, particularly in the North Central and North East. Our choice of location is influenced by research and data that shows that women and girls are at high risk of being marginalised in these regions because of existing cultural bias. We plan to achieve our scale reach by harnessing local support and leveraging our international network to garner resources needed to achieve our target. Specifically, we currently have community liaison officers across the 10 states where we plan to deploy our solution and we have a network of community based organisations to partner with. 

Most significantly, one of our impact goals is to enrol our beneficiaries in an online marketplace where they would have the opportunity to connect with private sector partners through internship placements and have a unique opportunity to apply their learning and skills to solve real-world problems. Moreso, Nigeria has the highest number of women owned SMEs in the world and want to see how the introduction of this method of learning and empowerment would help them scale their business through digital transformation. 

Finally, while our impact number is 2000 girls across 10 states and particularly in the Northern part of Nigeria where women and girls face stereotypes, we want to see behavioural changes in these communities through our #SafeSpaceForHer grassroots advocacy. We believe this would inspire neighbouring communities and government institutions to support our vision in bridging the gender digital divide and  empowering last mile users, particularly marginalised women and girls with digital capabilities required to thrive in this fourth industrial revolution. 

Our solution model is currently powered by Virtual Reality (VR), however, as we progress along our journey to scale, we hope to introduce AI models into our work that can give concise data and insights into how effective this learning method is in improving the overall learning experience of these students. Because we work in fragile contexts, we are taking into account the unintended outcomes of using AI for learning and this is why our of team member has joined the Centred for AI and Digital Policy to learn more about AI ethics and accountability framework through a broader lens that takes into account the social, economic and cultural background of our beneficiaries. 

We have been able to reach 900 girls across 10 schools in 12 communities through our pilot phase and we plan to reach 2000 girls in the next year.

Understanding our target audience entailed conducting a thorough risk assessment and mitigation. So far, we have been able to mitigate the cultural barriers that currently exist in the community we are serving, but a huge barrier that remains is the financial limitation, as the introduction of VR technology does not come cheap.

We are currently collaborating with the National Youth Service Corps to mobilise and retain highly effective corps members who have been matched with our organisation for a 12-month period to champion program implementation as learning facilitators. This collaboration is the result of a careful recruitment process that ensures we can attract component facilitators. Because NYSC is an annual national service requirement for all university graduates in Nigeria, our collaboration with the institution provides a sustainable pathway for recruiting facilitators across all states in Nigeria, where we intend to expand our solution.

As part of our equity, diversity and inclusion values, we are also partnering with the National Commision for Refugee, Migrants and Internally Displaced Persons to reach girls and women living in refugee and IDP camps. Our partnership with the commission helps to ensure that we can access every IDP and refugee camp currently in Nigeria without push back from the community or the government itself. This makes it easier for us to reach the kind of communities we want to serve. 

We are also in conversation with the National Information Technology Development Agency to leverage their existing innovation hubs as training centres in communities where we cannot provide an alternative learning centre.