G20 Flagship projects

Description of the project:

Haiti is currently the poorest country in the western hemisphere, with 80% of the population living under the poverty line and 54% living in abject poverty. Unemployment, at 40%, is the highest in the region, and the 2010 earthquake further inflicted $7.8 billion in damage, causing the country’s gross domestic product to contract. New job opportunities in the digital economy could contribute to new livelihoods, particularly for a large youth demographic in Haiti. Online work potentially expands women’s access to the workplace. For instance, in 2013, women comprised only 25% of the offline global, non-agricultural workforce, but online work platforms, such as Elance, included women as 44% of the workforce.
Haiti will need to overcome important challenges if it is to seize digital opportunities, and this project will engage local and regional stakeholders to address digital labour regulation, especially for online outsourcing, skills building, and enhancing digital infrastructure. This project will contribute to building a sustainable cohort of graduates with the required competencies to meet Haiti’s future technical needs for connectivity infrastructure, with a particular focus on women and girls. The project will focus on developing, piloting, and scaling locally adapted training courses for digital skills and data-driven entrepreneurship. In its first phase, it will seek to train at least 500 students in face-to-face initiatives, and may scale the online course offerings to 10,000 freelance professional women around the world.

Impact of the project:

– At least 500 students (women aged 18 to 25) trained in digital skills and data-driven entrepreneurship and at least 150 IT professionals trained in advanced Internet development and management issues,
– 10 IT professionals trained to teach digital education for women,
– 25 online courses piloted.

Area of focus of the project:

• ICT in formal education (teacher education, learning materials)
• non-formal training opportunities for women and girls in ICT (coding schools)
• increasing participation of girls in ICT studies (mentoring programmes, career counseling)
• enabling women’s entrepreneurship (entrepreneurship education, financing schemes, incubators)