81293844a - Implementation of Digital Skills Training Programmes

Kurze Beschreibung

The regional East African Community (EAC) project "Digital Skills for an Innovative East African Industry" (dSkills@EA) builds on its predecessor and continues to support the "Centre of Excellence for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in East Africa" (CENIT@EA) by further improving the quality and sustainability of the Master"s Programme "Embedded and Mobile Systems" (MSc EMoS), such as through close collaboration and involvement of the private sector. Furthermore, short course trainings on advanced digital skills for different target groups (unemployed graduates, private and public sector, university staff) are supported by the project. The trainings are in addition to the two-years MSc EMoS offered at CENIT@EA at the Nelson Mandela African Institution for Science and Technology (NM-AIST) in Arusha, Tanzania, to reach more beneficiaries. Finally, dSkills@EA improves the digital innovation and entrepreneurship capacity of young East African students at universities and graduates in the EAC through a regional network of innovation hubs, multi-stakeholder dialogues, and matchmaking mechanisms with companies.

The project focus is that, employment and innovation related digital skills of young people in the East African Community Partner States strengthened.

With the industry as an ultimate beneficiary of these digital skills, the collaboration with the private sector is a key element of dSkills@EA. In this regard, the project can build on the "ICT4Business" dialogue platform and established collaborations with companies like SAP, IBM or Kiira Motors.

dSkills@EA is part of the technical development cooperation between the EAC and Germany. It supports the EAC integration process and its economic development. The political partner is the EAC Secretariat, and the main implementation partner is the Inter-University Council for East Africa (IUCEA), together with an East African-German academic consortium and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The academic consortium is led by NM-AIST and the University of Oldenburg in Germany. Other consortium partners include the University of Dar Es Salaam (Tanzania), University of Technology and Arts in Byumba (Rwanda), Mannheim University of Applied Sciences and the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). Further partners include innovation hubs, national and regional industry associations as well as regional and international companies.

This consulting assignment supports dSkills@EA in its efforts of its digital skills trainings intervention area (Output 3). The specific objective for that project area is that short-term training courses for digital skills designed according to the needs of the industry have been successfully carried out.

Demand for digital skills training is continuing to surge, as jobs that previously did not require digital skills more and more do so and as digitalization is creating new jobs that did not exist before. Digitalisation capacities have in addition become a crucial aspect for the competitiveness and innovativeness of companies. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the speed of change.

The project is addressing this digital transformation by aiming to equip its target group of young people from university as well as businesses with the necessary market oriented digital skills to increase their employability and provide businesses with the necessary skills to harness the benefits of digitalisation and become more competitive and innovative. Thereby these trainings fit in the logic of the EAC development strategy which demonstrates the importance of accelerating the utilization of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for driving socio-economic development and integration.