Empower women and girls through digital access

In April, we launched growskills.africa, an online resource designed with and for African youth workers so they can go forward and empower the women and girls in their communities. The website has been specifically designed in collaboration with African youth workers to be mobile-first, low-data and accessible to all.

In the UK and other Western countries, putting information online typically means creating well-designed PDF documents. Through speaking with our partners on the ground, we realised that this wouldn’t be widely accessible to many African women, who often only access the internet via their smartphone. It’s difficult and time-consuming to read a large PDF on a small phone screen. 

We spent time with our partner organisations and youth workers in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria in order to find solutions to this problem, and make our work as accessible as possible.

We have learned through our work that data costs are one of the main barriers that women face when using the internet as a resource for learning. 

In the end we chose a traditional website, optimised for use primarily on smart phones. Unlike a PDF, where you can have long chapters, this resource is designed to be read on a phone, and the content was written with this in mind. Each section is short and self-contained, designed to make sense on a mobile. 

We have used very few images to reduce data consumption, and the majority of these are vectored images, which use little data to load.

This website is a resource we are proud of and seek to continue to improve, so that it meets the emerging needs of those transforming the lives of young women and girls in their communities. 

Thank you for supporting WONDER and making projects like this possible.