Deadline: 31-Mar-21
To identify and celebrate existing good practice for teaching digital skills in Southeast Asia, the World Bank is hosting a regional competition, inviting public and private organizations (not individuals) to demonstrate how their programs are helping to address these challenges.
Digitalization is rapidly reshaping economies in Southeast Asia. Big firms that export or form a part of global value chains and regional digital platforms are adopting digital technologies to stay competitive. At the same time, digital technologies are making significant inroads into smaller domestic enterprises.
While technology is quickly advancing, students and workers are struggling to acquire digital skills that are necessary for success in the labor market. There is a shortage of institutions to teach those skills, and access to such learning may be particularly challenging for certain groups. This result in a growing gap between the digital skills that employers need and the digital skills that workers have.
Award Categories
The competition aims to identify innovative programs that teach any of the following four categories of essential skills for the digital workplace and the digital economy:
- Specialized digital skills for information and communication technology (ICT)
- (e.g. programming, network design, data analytics).
- Professional digital skills using occupation-specific software that requires data input and manipulation
- (e.g. information management, graphic design, 3D printing).
- Basic digital literacy and productivity skills
- (e.g. use of word processing, spreadsheets, internet browsing).
- Soft skills for the digital economy
- (e.g. problem solving, communication, critical thinking, creativity).
Awards & Recognition
Participants can submit a program in multiple categories of the competition, but each submission can only be awarded once across all categories.
- Youth programs: Participants can apply to this category if their program is dedicated to young learners up to 25 years old.
- Women’s empowerment: Participants can apply to this category if their program is dedicated to girls and women, whatever their age and socio-economic status. Female learners should account for 90% or more of all learners for a program to be eligible.
- Work-based training and employer’s support: This category will recognize initiatives managed by employers (on-the-job training, internships, etc.) or mainly funded by employers, either private or public.
- Lifelong learning: This category accepts any program designed to train or retrain adults (18+ years old), who are illiterate, low-skilled workers, or workers wishing to update their skills for success in the digital economy.
- Long-range access solutions: This category focuses on training remote and hard-to-access populations.
Eligibility Criteria
- Public and private organizations implementing training programs are encouraged to submit descriptions of their innovative initiatives to teach necessary skills in a digitalizing workplace in Southeast Asia. Individuals are not eligible.
- Organizations acting as a partner for relevant programs – such as sponsors or advisors – should liaise with the organization in charge of the implementation of the program (referred to as “the implementing organization”). In the event that various organizations wish to jointly enter the competition, they should appoint a coordinator who will consolidate all the materials into a single entry.
- The competition is open to organizations in all ASEAN countries, but focusing mainly on less developed regions, as well as less-skilled populations.
- There is no restriction on the number of programs each organization can submit.
For more information, visit https://bit.ly/3jy8nkO