Over 800 South Sudanese benefitted from the Digital and Innovations Skills Hub (DISH), an e-learning platform that provides access to youth as well as women to develop employment skills.
The project, implemented by Community Empowerment for Progress Organization (CEPO) with support from the Dutch organisation for internationalisation in education (NUFFIC), had four online training courses.
“The objective of DISH is to increase enrolment in certificate education in order to increase employment possibilities. Especially since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, youth and women face challenges to find employment, while employers struggle to employ people with matching skills in fast-growing sectors in the employment market,” said Peter Bidali Elias, CEPO’s officer in-charge of the project.
He added, “The opportunities and sectors of employment have been identified through research by the partners in earlier programmes which identified key employment sectors for youth”.
Through DISH, online short certificate courses, which included Business Administration, Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Peace Building and primary school teaching, were created and made available.
According to Bidali, these three-month certificate courses increase the employability of youth and women because they link to key emerging sectors in employment and contribute to stability, peace and resilience.
“This is to increase enrolment in certificate education in order to enhance employment possibilities in youth and women across the country,” he said.
The certificate in Business Administration course attracted 431 students, Peace Building had 386, Primary School Teaching with 161 and ICT got 88.
Perina Juye, a Business Administration student, said she learnt a lot from the course, especially key considerations when one intends to open a business.
“My advice is that learning sessions should be more interactive,” she urged.
For his part, Martin Seree, a student of Basic ICT said the e-learning platform will provide access to youth as well as women to develop employment skills.
“During the course, I was able to acquire a lot of networking skills, learned operating systems and other IT related skills that I lacked,” he explained.
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, youth and women faced challenges in employment as employers struggled to find skilled people.
The latest World Population Review ranks South Sudan as the third lowest in literacy rate in world and thus anticipated that DISH courses will bridge that gap by focusing on low-threshold e-learning courses, which can be used in online and offline digital learning on a variety of devices and settings.
