Youth, Work, Mobiles and Poverty: everything you need to know

Across the world, kids are our future. They are also unemployed, under-resourced, and working hard to put things right

If you are interested in youth workforce development, and the empowering opportunities of mobile, I'd encourage you to look at the brand new Mobiles for Youth Workforce Development (mYWD) Landscape Review. It's a meaty read, but contains an excellent summary of most of the current, significant initiatives in mobile development, targeting youth employment across the globe

To quote from their overview:

Youth make up 17 percent of the world’s population and 40 percent of the world’s unemployed, according to the International Labor Organization. A number of factors combine to make sustainable, decent employment an enormous challenge for youth the world over, including low levels of education and technical skills, slow job growth, lack of information about available jobs, and difficulties accessing financial capital to start small enterprises. Decent jobs are especially difficult to find for rural youth, girls and women, and youth with disabilities.

In addition to the growth in youth unemployment, access to and use of mobile technologies among youth worldwide is also expanding. This has created excitement about the potential of mobile devices to catalyze new approaches that address some of the constraints keeping youth from finding and sustaining decent livelihoods. Documentation and evidence of impact in the broad field of mobile technology and youth workforce development (mYWD) is lacking, however, meaning that it has been difficult to identify where mobile technology and youth workforce development initiatives overlap and where mobile may have the greatest added value.

.

After a year of hard work, we’ve launched the mEducation Alliance’sMobiles for Youth Workforce Development (mYWD) Landscape Review, an effort supported by The MasterCard Foundation and USAID. The review maps out who is doing what and where, and to the extent possible, discusses evidence of what is working. The body of the report answers questions such as:

• What organizations and programs are using mobiles to help overcome the barriers to employment for youth?
• What type of programming has been implemented and how?
• Where do prime opportunities exist for integrating mobile devices into youth workforce development programs?
• What are relevant considerations related to gender and disability in mYWD programming?
• What factors facilitate or hinder mYWD in specific contexts?
• Are there any research findings that show the impact of mobiles on youth workforce development?

 

If that isn't enough, there is a thorough annexe at the end, listing 80 initiatives and over 275 publicly available documents that have fed into this review

Well worth a read. You can get the review here: http://www.meducationalliance.org/sites/default/files/mywd_landscape_review_final2013.pdf

 

 

Wikipedia Zero launches in India!

Wikipedia Zero - an ambitious project aiming to bring free access to Wikipedia to all developing countries - has signed it's first deal in India.

This is great news for the 60 million subscribers of Aircel (India's 7th largest network provider), who now get free access to all wikipedia information via the Wikipedia Zero. This is also great news for the developing world at large. The more popular demand for this, the more local operators will take heed, and offer this free data access to their subscribers.

This brings the number of people with free access to over half a billion! If you are in one of the following 17 countries (and using the right network), you won't need to pay any data rates to access all the knowledge in Wikipedia:

Uganda, Tunisia, Malaysia, Niger, Kenya, Montenegro, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Botswana, Russia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India

Wikipedia Zero works in the same way as Facebook Zero, offering a minimal (low data) version of their site to specific operators, and covering the data costs themselves. Users can browse on that specific URL, without paying any data charges.

Users can access Wikipedia at zero.wikipedia.org and  m.wikipedia.org - but if you are browsing from a different network, you won't get it free (in the case of "zero", you might not even see it!)

We haven't been able to test the difference is between the "m" and the "zero" sites, but believe that "zero" has no images at all, and is even faster, with a more minimalist design to perform better on low end devices and slow connections.

It is not really possible to estimate the impact of sharing free knowledge with hard to reach areas in the world without getting all misty eyed and coming up with bland generalisations, so I'd rather like to point you to one small story from a shanty town just outside Cape Town, South Afrtica:

Sinenjongo High School is made of old shipping containers, in a township of very poor dwellings, populated by people who really do not have very much going for them, apart from their own energy, and initiative

Staff and kids at the school heard about Wikipedia Zero - which is NOT currently available to them, and set up a petition to the local network providers to sign up.

This made the local press, which caught the eye of the South African wikipedia team, who passed on the message to their global team.

This in turn, helped generate huge online interest. See this fantastic blog post from from Victor Grigas, a wikipedian who was so inspired he made his first trip to Africa to meet the school

The story isn't over yet. South Africa doesn't have Wikipedia Zero. (nor do many other needy countries), but the more voices that are heard, the closer we will get to freedom of information, and rights to knowledge!

 

Spread the word

Introducing the $35 tablet!

I had the honour of meeting one of the Global VPs at TATA today, and getting a small insight into the extraordinary power of the Indian market for technology.

One part of our discussion was about the recent announcement of a $35 Android powered tablet targeting education

Yes – you heard that right. $35 !

(it is not quite that simple, of course. An Indian manufacturer has made a lovely prototype, and has offered to supply 1m of the devices for $35m, which the government is considering to buy for education)

But = still. $35 for an Android powered tablet (with all the extras you would expect) does sound awfully compelling!

 

What do you think?

Let us know your comments, or if you find further links to it