Marginalized communities in Garissa, Wajir, Turkana and Elgeyo Marakwet are set to benefit from a digital skills training programme aimed at enhancing digital inclusion among marginalized communities.
The programme is targeting women and girls, senior citizens, smallholder farmers, and persons with disabilities to digitally empower them and ease access to digital services.
The three-year initiative dubbed Digitally Enabled Gender Equity and Social Inclusion for Disadvantaged and Excluded Communities in Kenya (DEGESI) will be implemented by the African Centre for Women, Information, and Communications Technology (ACWICT) with support from UK Government Digital Access Programme (UK DAP).
Speaking during the inaugural meeting of the programme in Garissa, the Head of Programmes at ACWICT Merciline Oyier said that the project would help in bolstering social economic empowerment among digitally excluded persons in the country. "We are doing the digital skilling for citizens to be able to bolster the socio-economic empowerment for the communities that are excluded from the mainstream spaces so that they can access digital services," Oyier said. "We are giving preference to young women, smallholder farmers and those in the boda boda sector because as you know, these sectors provide many employment opportunities for many of us and yet they do not have the skills to enable them to optimize on the opportunities presented by the digital structures," she added.
