DigitALL: Digital data skills education supporting home-based mums to upskill for more freelance opportunities in the Philippines
This year, the United Nations Observance theme for International Women’s Day, DigitALL, recognizes and celebrates advances in gender equality through transformative technology and digital education. BPP supports businesses to innovate and apply technology to achieve social impact, including through cutting-edge software and fintech applications, digital education and digitized farming processes. This week, to celebrate International Women’s Day, we are profiling some of these partnerships, whose work to provide digital solutions to pressing problems is improving the lives and livelihoods of women and girls across Asia and the Pacific.
In the Philippines, a BPP partnership is offering digital data skills learning opportunities to a network of home-based mums to increase their ability to find freelance work.
The partnership, between Eskwelabs, Filipina Home-Based Moms (FHMoms) and the Australian Government, has developed Data Literacy Skillscourse – and made it freely available to mums in the FHMoms’ network – to equip women freelance workers with the skills needed to obtain high-value digital work opportunities.
Throughout the partnership, Eskwlabs has worked to constantly evolve and upgrade the digital learning platform, including a major update to the way the course is delivered to move away from individual, asynchronous learning towards a peer-based group approach. In this format a cohort of learners move through the course together. This has not only dramatically increased completion rates, but also allows learners to develop valuable and supportive networks and build skills such as teamwork, self-confidence, and public speaking.
Learners have expressed the value of these connections, with learner Donna stating that “through these webinars I got introduced to another community, my second fam, my Eskwelabs community, during the ‘Level Up Kumare’, a data driven webinar which helped me skill up and pursue my love for data.” Now graduated from the data literacy program, Donna intends to pursue further learning through Eskwelabs, in Data Science.
“Whatever path I am destined to be at, I know I will be ready for 2023 because I have this inspiring SuperMoms community constantly pushing me and making me see my capabilities,” she says.
In a survey of 55 learners, 93% found that the Data Literacy Skills course positively impacted their self confidence and ability to manage the future, and 89% said they were able to apply the skills taught in their work.Eskwelab’s Data Literacy course currently has a waitlist of more than 5,000 learners, and hopes to have 10,000 learners either enrolled or graduated by the end of this year.
Learn more about this partnership here: https://thebpp.com.au/partnership/data-upskilling-for-freelance-workers/
