UNESCO organised the first online partners meeting of the Global Skills Academy (GSA) on 17 March 2021. The meeting gathered around 60 participants, therein founding and new partners of the academy including representatives of companies and international organisations, as well as UNESCO colleagues.
The partners meeting provided a space to take stock of progress and discuss among partners the next steps of the GSA with a view to improve and accelerate the implementation of the pilot phase. It also opened a discussion about challenges, the next steps and the possibility of establishing the GSA from a demand driven perspective.
A quest for scaling up the Global Skills Academy to support skills development
Mr. Borhene Chakroun, Director of the Division of Policies and Lifelong Learning at the Education Sector, UNESCO, opened the meeting. Mr. Chakroun recalled that the purpose of the GSA, launched on World Youth Skills Day in 2020, was to make youth more resilient in a disrupted labour market, and emphasized the importance of the GSA in the framework of the Global Education Coalition (GEC):
“When we started the GEC we were 30 partners, today we are more than 170. The Coalition is vibrant, we are making progress and we wish to see even more progress in the GSA. We have around 140.000 participants in the skills programs for now, but we have a target of one million, so the question is how we can accelerate,” said Mr. Chakroun.
“We are still in a protracted crisis, but we are already thinking about the recovery dimension. The recovery phase will include digital learning, among other things - how can we scale up the GSA, and how can we accelerate connectivity and the education resources further? “
Mr. Hervé Huot-Marchand, Chief of Youth, Literacy and Skills Development Section from the Education Sector, UNESCO, presented an overview of the status of the GSA, showing some key figures regarding progress made and highlighting challenges to achieving the ambitious target of reaching 1 million beneficiaries.
DIOR’s Women@DIOR mentorship program for female students is currently covering 18 countries, and PIX’s digital skills program is rolled out in Benin, Madagascar, Morocco, Togo and Tunisia amounts to more than 66,000 beneficiaries globally. Other partners’ programs such as those of Coursera, Festo, IBM and Microsoft will be implemented in the coming weeks. UNESCO forecasts that at least 75,000 students and teachers spread across 21 TVET institutions in 13 countries will benefit from them. A GEC progress report with more details will be shared shortly.
“Being a leader has given me so much confidence in myself” - Ms. Chinwendu Ukaha, a GSA beneficiary from Nigeria
The meeting also provided an opportunity to hear testimonials from three different perspectives, therein a country, a private sector partner and a young student perspective. All three cemented their commitment to the GSA.
In a video message from Ms. Soumaya Samlali, Head of the International Cooperation Division at OFPPT, a regional and international hub for vocational training in Morocco, Ms. Samlali shared some of the positive outcomes of the collaboration with UNESCO and its partners, in particular with Microsoft, PIX, IBM, and quite recently DIOR.
“The trainings that are offered will benefit our trainees, our trainers and trainers of trainers. It will also benefit certain types of very small businesses and small companies within the framework of IBM’s support, and benefit educators and IT staff as part of Microsoft’s support,” said Ms. Samlali.
A young Mentee from the Women@DIOR program from Nigeria, Ms. Chinwendu Ukaha, shared how the programme inspired her to further build her leadership skills and motivated her to be a role model for other girls:
“During the project we had to come together as a team. We brainstormed and discussed how we can contribute and involve girls in sustaining a clean environment. The project has gone so far as to receiving attention on social media. Being a leader has given me so much confidence in myself, especially learning from the sessions on autonomy and self-discovery. This has opened my eyes to the fact that there is so much more to do for the environment, that giving back to society rather than just expecting is important, and that it’s important to tell other girls that a clean and sustainable environment matters.”
Ms. Alexa Joyce, Director of EMEA Digital Transformation & Skills at Microsoft and one of the partners of the GSA, emphasized her interest in looking into potential cross linkages among GSA partners and a more comprehensive implementation at national level, pointing out the increased demand and interest in building more sophisticated digital literacy learning opportunities.
Plans to improve the Global Skills Academy
The last part of the meeting covered the next steps of the GSA. Mr. Huot-Marchand recalled the need to think beyond COVID-19, and to reflect on how the GSA can establish itself as a more demand-driven initiative in the framework of the future labour market and skills needs.
Mr. Huot-Marchand described the key assets of the GSA as being the possibility to capitalize on the pilot phase; the fruitful partnership with the private sector; the potential interlinkages with other international organisations, and the high request from countries. However, some of the main obstacles of the GSA were reaching end beneficiaries through online training despite the lack of infrastructure, connectivity issues and restrained financial resources, as well as difficulties identifying which soft and hard skills are needed the most.
During the discussion, partners mentioned, among other things, a need to establish a monitoring tool to make sure that institutions can trace what students are doing with the skills they are learning; a need to better understand the skills needs at country level so that the GSA can effectively cater to them, and finally engaging even more with international organisations.
The Global Skills Academy (GSA), was launched by UNESCO on World Youth Skills Day in July 2020 with the aim to help one million young people and adults build skills for employability and resilience by June 2021. The GSA is under the umbrella of the Global Education Coalition and offers free online trainings to respond to the growing consequences of COVID-19 on skills development and youth employment around the world. Its priority focus is on boosting digital competencies among youth in the least developed countries.
Training opportunities cover a variety of areas including digital, entrepreneurial and leadership skills and are provided in various languages including English, French and Spanish, targeting not only students, young job seekers and entrepreneurs, but also education professionals such as teachers, trainers, instructional designers and administrative personnel. As part of UNESCO’s efforts to cater to different context-specific skills needs, beneficiaries are identified with the help of the global UNEVOC network to ensure relevant matching the demand and supply.