World Youth Skills Day celebrates 43,100 youth learn coding in wider MENA
Digital Skills for Today, a corporate social responsibility (CSR) collaboration between global technology company SAP, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Injaz Al Arab, ReBootKamp (RBK), and re:Coded, is on a mission to empower the youth from an early age all the way to employment, with a vision to contribute to the entire region stabilization. Digital Skills for Today includes introducing Digital Literacy, Upskilling for Employment and Fostering Entrepreneurship.
More than 900 bootcamp graduates have gained employment in Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, and Yemen, as well in other countries, including Canada and Sweden. Digital Skills for Today coding raised awareness of the importance and value of digital literacy as the new language to support the era of digital transformation.
Over 43,100 youth across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have learned much-needed coding skills, fostering youth development and job creation, industry experts announced ahead of the United Nation’s World Youth Skills Day on15 July. In an IT market predicted by IDC to top USD 83 billion in 2020, coding is taking on increased prominence in the job market, especially with the UAE-led 1 Million Arab Coders Initiative to foster coding-related jobs.
In post-COVID-19 societies, as young people are called upon to contribute to the recovery effort, World Youth Skills Day calls attention to students’ needs to be equipped with the skills to successfully manage evolving challenges and the resilience to adapt to future disruptions.
SAP’s contribution to UNHCR was able to support 945 displaced persons in MENA in the response to COVID-19. In addition, SAP collaborated with Ashoka ChangemakerXchange in hosting a MENA Changemakers Against COVID-19 program, where twenty-three MENA changemakers were selected to participate in a Resilience Program that supported them to sustain and scale their impact in developing solutions to the COVID-19 crisis in the region.
