Ensure inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning.
A global overview
Education enables upward socio-economic mobility and is a key to escaping poverty. Education helps reduce inequalities and reach gender equality and is crucial to fostering tolerance and
more peaceful societies.
A global perspective on education from the UN Sustainability Development goals
Over the past decade, major progress was made towards increasing access to education and school enrollment rates at all levels, particularly for girls. Nevertheless, about 260 million children were still out of school in 2018 — nearly one fifth of the global population in that age group. And more than half of all children and adolescents worldwide are not meeting minimum proficiency standards in reading and mathematics.
Sub-Saharan Africa faces the biggest challenges in providing schools with basic resources. The situation is extreme at the primary and lower secondary levels, where less than one half of schools in sub-Saharan Africa have access to drinking water, electricity, computers and the Internet.
Inequalities will also worsen unless the digital divide – the gap between
under-connected and highly digitalized countries – is not addressed.
How is digital tech relevant to education?
Areas of tension
These are the issues, negative impacts and concerns collectively raised by the attendees from our pilot workshops.
For the digital tech workforce
- Social science, art and ethics are not seen as key knowledge areas for the tech workforce to have, the focus is predominantly on technical/engineering based skills.
- The tech workforce is not offered education by a diverse section of the global population, thereby perpetuating sterotypes.
- English is the dominate language in the tech world, which makes it harder to non-native speakers to learn.
For the global population
- Certain privileges are required to begin an education in tech, meaning those people that would benefit the most from the upward social mobility offered by careers in digital tech are unable to get started:
- Access to machine and internet to work with
- Access to reliable energy source to power machine
- Adequate basic education and critical thinking training
- Access to learning, documentation and mentors in own language
- Digital technologies make it easier and quicker to spread misinformation.
How can we nudge these tensions for the better?
Grounds for hope
These are visions and ideas for change collectively raised by the attendees from our pilot workshops.
For the digital tech workforce
- Socially-minded education for tech.
- Access to continuous learning that is multidisciplinary.
- Learning will be available in multiple languages as well as cross-cultural experiences.
For the global population
- Fair contracts and benefits for gig economy workers.
Keen to learn more?
If you’d like to explore these issues yourself, either as an individual or with your work colleagues, why not run your own workshop?
Our workshop methodology is open source and available for anyone to use for free. Alternatively you can hire trusted professionals to facilitate the process on your behalf.