Govt allows awarding of contract for DigiSkills project

ISLAMABAD: The government on Monday approved the awarding of contracts for the flagship DigiSkills Training Project and National Incubation Center Karachi, a statement said.

“The flagship DigiSkills programme is being initiated to fill industry-academia gap and is aimed to impart state-of-the-art skills to one million youth through proper training and mentorship,” said Anusha Rahman, minister for IT and telecom, at Ignite - National Technology Fund’s 57th board meeting that gave the aforementioned approvals.

Rahman added that the objective was to have more skilled people who could earn their livelihood working from home by equipping them with modern technical knowledge and ‘e-lancing’ techniques.

She explained that the programme is a scaled version of the ICT for Girls programme , which started with the establishment of some 150 labs complete with Microsoft 4Cs training programme for around 35000 disadvantaged girls per year.

“To further scale the efforts the board set a target about a year ago to initiate planning for 1 million programme which finally took shape,” Rahman said. During the meeting, the statement said, the Board was told that initially 12 training modules were being introduced in DigiSkills programme, which would be scaled up in the subsequent phases.

“Initial modules being launched touch upon the areas of digital literacy, marketing, freelancing, graphics design, creative writing and e-commerce management etc,” the statement said. It added the key differentiating factor of the programme would be that it would utilise artificial intelligence and data driven decision-making for matching content with trainees and to fine tune the quality of content and coach to trainee ratio. “Subsequent, the phases will include deeper areas of IT focus like data sciences, cyber security and others,” the statement said.