With the accelerated spread of information and communication technologies (ICTs) developing communities need to use them to be able to share in the global reach for information, communication and productivity. Our aim is to provide women and youth with an educational venue for better livelihood opportunities, through improved access to information and its use in skill development that can lead to employment or the establishment of small and micro enterprises (SMEs). This is achieved by building the capacities of the local NGOs and CBOs as they are one of the engines to help their communities to bridge the poverty gap.
This operational manual has been designed to assist the ArabDev facilitators to use information and communication tools (ICTs) in project management. Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to a broad range of activities in order to meet the requirements of the particular project. NGOs and development workers are encouraged to use ICTs to enhance the development work of their non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and to find ways to expose their served communities to ICTs for their personal advancement.
Developing ICT skills for personal and livelihood improvement is vital to attain self-reliability. Self-reliability is the first step to break the cycle of poverty that is handed down from one generation to the next.
Self-reliability is a concept that has to be stressed in community development, only if the individuals we are working with are taught how to rely on themselves to attain their personal and community goals do we have made a behavioural change that has the potential of continuous empowerment.
ICTs introduce a new way of life as they are opening the possibility of self-teaching, research and exploration that is independent from the physical location one is in. At the same time however these advantages are challenged by the demand for “lifelong learning”. Today, to maintain one’s edge in the marketplace, each individual has to be in a continuous quest for information, techniques, skills and knowledge.
This permanent learning cycle demands a constant re-skilling and learning update that has be done at the individual and the collective level. The introduction to ICTs is only one little step in the self-improvement, self-reliability and self-empowerment cycle that individuals and communities have to attain as a way of life.
Our role as development facilitators is to introduce our target communities to ICT and to make them aware of the requests that the information age is making on each one of us if we, as individuals and as countries, want to maintain a competitive edge in the economic market.
To have the biggest developmental impact ICTs should be taught to children at schools. ArabDev the targeting poor school children in deprived areas to teach them how to use information technology to improve their present and their future.
Children are the biggest developmental investment, they are the agents of the future. By teaching them how to use ICTs they gain knowledge of these technologies early in their life and learn how best to use them to further their education and their general knowledge.
Language is an important element in the use of ICTs. Children have greater linguistic assimilation capacities than adults. English is the Internet’s first language, for example. Arab content is being build slowly, but a linguistically diverse Internet is going to remain and children are well posed to learn languages easier. The children of today will furthermore be responsible of the Arabic content of the Internet in the near future
Children are the creative element of the future and the bearers of the culture of their ancestors, their early exposition to ICTs is an added vehicle to use it creatively and to respectfully represent their cultural heritage.
Furthermore, early introduction to ICTs give children a chance to become interested and proficient in their use and to encourage them to pursue further knowledge in these new technologies in their more advanced studies. The use of ICTs becomes a part of life for these children as it is for the more privileged of them and we are able to close the knowledge gap in the upcoming generations.
Girls and women are customarily the most disadvantaged segment of the society, with strict limitations on movement and reach out. ICTs are an ideal tool for females to be able to surpass their limitations and participate in the workforce through the outreach capacities of the new communication technologies.
ICTs bring work closer to home, if not even afford access to work from home. Women who are the caregivers for their children and families benefit most from bringing work closer to the physical home.
In the Arab region moreover women are often limited in their educational and work pursuit to locations that are geographically close to their home. ICTs as a tool offers more options to women in their present marginalized role to circumvent some of the limitations imposed on them by the dominant culture and participate in mainstream life.
ICTs also offer a means to find information about legal, societal and life issues that is wide open to women who know how to use these information accessing tools.
Increasing rates of unemployment among educated youths is undermining societal and individual efforts for self-sustainability through earned income. By learning new ICT skills youths might be able to find revenue earning opportunities.
Unemployment is a daily reality for an increasing segment of the youth in Egypt. By ILO estimates in the late 1990s, 34% of Egypt’s youth were unemployed. Another problem facing youths coming out of the educational system at its varied levels is the discrepancy between market needs and the offered educational degrees. Many diploma graduates, for example, find themselves lacking the skills to find work in their field of specialization. On the other hand, youths with college degrees end up in manual jobs because they are more profitable and available. The latter have often a feeling of personal dissatisfaction though because societal values rate wide collar work higher than manual work.
The insufficient local job absorption capacity was masked when other Arab countries had a high demand for Egyptian labour. This trend has markedly decreased in the last decade and the numbers of youths that cannot find the needed income to establish and independent life is increasing.
There are many community development initiatives in Egypt and the Arab world that can be models, lessons learned and are liable to scaling by other NGOs, CBOs, communities and individuals. ICT enables the transmission of selected initiatives to a large public cheaply and across large geographic expanses.
With many diverse community development initiatives in countries that have a lot of similarity in terms of language, culture and aspirations one should not reinvent the wheel. Development initiatives in the Arab region could learn a lot from each other and thereby economize on time, efforts and money – not to say minimize the repetition of mistakes.
The communication technologies are ideal for the transmission cost-effective of models and pilot developmental projects across different parts of a country or across nation states. The unified language and similar culture in most of the Arab region are also factors enhancing the lessons learned, replication and scaling of developmental initiatives.
The Arab world needs more of a sub-culture of development that is suited to its particular needs and is more in line with the aspiration of its grass-roots. To make different developmental experiences available on the Internet is a way to reach this collective goal.
Skills for Life aims to provide NGOs and their communities with the needed knowledge to use information and communication technologies (ICT) to accelerate developmental efforts and to improve individual lives. This manual is a guide to understand and to put into practice some of ICTs tools for community development in Egypt. The manual is presented in non-technical language to be understood by everyone regardless of their knowledge of computers and related ICTs.
The manual offers ways to teach low income, underserved communities how to use ICT to improve their lives, be it through added skills for income generation and/or through an increased access to information. Everyone can use the manual to help acquire technological skills that can improve the life of their communities and themselves. The main user of this manual is intended to be the development practitioner at the grassroots level.
To disseminate ICT and to educate people in how to use it to better their lives be it through information, knowledge, income - or a combination of all three – needs more than providing people with the skills to operate this technology. It requires good observation and listening abilities to find out what people need and what they are interested in learning, and to make them aware of what ICT can do to improve their lives. Any communication of this sort has to be simple and engaging. The two parties have to have an open dialogue and be able to share opinions, aspirations and knowledge.
Children, youth and adults - female and male – in the low-income brackets and those who work with them to promote their well being, are the primary target group for the Skills for Life manual. ICT is not an end in itself. Therefore it is most successful when it is taught in conjunction to other developmental goals. The most appropriate persons to impart the knowledge of how to use this new technology and for what ends are the individuals who work closely with the community. These community workers are often from all walks of life, they are involved with teachers, health workers, business associations, community and women’s groups, public authorities and religious heads. Most of these development workers are staff members of NGOs or CBOs or are closely connected with them.
Information is not neutral, we assimilate information differently from person to person. Make the information you give to others:
There is no unified language or way to transfer information, knowledge and skills. The teaching and information sharing of Skills for Life needs to be adapted to the particular individual, group and community it is communicated to. This manual keeps the messages intentionally general. Local culture, circumstances and needs are the guidelines to using this manual.
Different circumstances and needs require different ways to effectively communicate information and knowledge, but there are basic principles that one can rely on when communicating:
Even with your best efforts and intentions, sometimes your training and teaching will not have the desired results. Understanding - from the very start - what the needs, aspirations, potential and weaknesses your target group has can often avoid problems later on.
Tip: If possible, use a mixture of training and teaching techniques, examples of which are audio-visual material, group work, competitions, research, role-playing, etc. to communicate knowledge and skills.
Tip: Use simple language and reduce technicalities to a minimum. Ask your students frequent questions to make sure that they are all following you. Have patience with the ones who need the information to be repeated for them. You might get surprised and find them the most dedicated students in the longer term.
Tip: Repeat the information frequently, show skills in action, give lots of examples and let your students explain to their colleagues how and what they have learned. Provide plenty of hands-on-training training and follow up. Monitor your trainees and ask them if they want you to make something clearer to them. Make sure, through questions that your students understand what you are teaching them.
Tip: Find out why this is the case. Find out the reason so that you will be able to increasing training quota as much as possible.
Tip: After knowing the cause of the problem try to find local solutions or substitutes to alleviate the obstacle(s) as much as possible. For example, if there is not enough public IT equipment to train on, try to know the closest computer lab open to the public. Encourage the development of a small enterprise for opening a computer lab or Internet café. Poverty and health issues will be harder to solve. In many cases liaising with other people working for poverty alleviation or health issuesin the area is the best first step to help out.
Audio visuals in the form of posters, overhead projections, computer based visuals, or related ways to graphically express an information are excellent training and teaching tools. The human memory is strengthened by the visual representation of information and by repetition. If you want to spread knowledge over a wider area local radio stations have proven to be immensely effective. You can publicize your activities and gain more trainees for example through airing the importance of ICT in a person’s life through a popular radio programme. A children’s play or a puppet show is also a successful way to pass on knowledge and to raise interest in the young to learn about the new technology. You might want to try a local newspaper too. Your creativity and imagination is the limit to spreading information, the Internet is a cheap and accessible way to publicize to a local, national, regional and international audience.
The best training/teaching is done person-to-person. Most of us learn best when someone shows us how to use new equipment and how to implement a new skill. Talking directly with a person gives us the opportunity to ask and to engage in a dialogue.
The most effective way to disseminate information is to use both the person-to-person approach and the group dissemination approach. Each of these approaches reinforces the other.
Effective learning requires a cycle of information, action and thought. People learn best when they participate actively in identifying a problem, in developing and carrying out a solution, and in reviewing the results. The process of communicating Skills for Life messages should therefore allow the participants to play an active role.
The goal of Skills for Life is to improve the life quality of poor people in Egypt. One of the first things to teach is self-reliance, the knowledge that every person is responsible to strive to attain the best possible life under her/his conditions and that this is partly possible by gaining more information and skills. Often a person, women in particular, hold deeply held images of themselves that they are not capable of improving their life by their own will, energy and talents. Sometimes you will find yourself that you are teaching people courage and self-confidence before you can teach them new information and ICT skills.