Latest news with #digitalinclusion
The Herald
7 days ago
- General
- The Herald
'Now I can do it myself': Gogos learn to use smartphones in 'Gogos with Vuma' digital skills training programme
In a step towards digital inclusion, 49 elderly residents from Katlehong graduated on Friday from a digital skills training programme aimed at empowering senior citizens with essential tech knowledge. Hosted by VumaTel in partnership with goGOGOgo (NPC) at Matsediso Primary School in Katlehong on the East Rand, the programme equipped the participants, many of whom had little or no prior experience with technology, with vital digital skills. It covered fundamental skills such as using smartphones, navigating the internet, sending emails, using social media, accessing online services and practising digital safety. One of the graduates, Phinet Lekau, 88, speaking at the graduation ceremony, said he was grateful to have been part of the course as he now knew how to use the internet, order supplies from shops and speak to his friends with ease. 'I knew nothing about the internet before this course. My grandchildren would simply call me holding the phone, telling me what to do. But this course has opened my eyes. I can now do all of those things on my own,' said Lekau. Agnes Letsoge, 82, said she can now use her smartphone. 'I am very happy to have been part of this programme, because the phone was being used by my grandchildren and they would constantly finish my money and airtime. Since I've been taught how to use it by myself, I can finally enjoy my pension money,' Letsoge said. Before doing the course she couldn't even load airtime, she said. 'Now I can do it myself, they can no longer rob me,' she said. Vumatel CSI co-ordinator Thando Mokoena said with most NGOs focusing on the youth and children, they identified a gap for training for the elderly. 'We know that almost 40% of children in South Africa are living with grandparents. We want to revive that thing that they are still here, we still care and we see that they matter. The course we put them through is a standard ICT course, learning how to browse the internet, and how to use a smartphone, as most of them used or knew how to use small phones,' Mokoena said. The programme, which was part of Vumatel's ongoing commitment to community upliftment and digital inclusion, also fostered intergenerational learning, with younger facilitators helping to mentor the elderly participants throughout their training. Jane Simmonds, founder and executive director for goGOGOgo (NPC), an NGO aimed at building capacity in elderly people raising grandchildren, Simmonds explained that with 9.7-million children in South Africa essentially living in multigenerational households with grandparents playing an important part in their upbringing, the organisation is working to strengthen the role of the older people to build their footprint and amplify their voices. This is to ultimately give them knowledge, information and modern-day practices to navigate raising children in the digital age. 'Many of these older people are also raising fourth generation, so they raise their children, their grandchildren and are now looking after their great-grandchildren. We are working at strengthening the role of these women and men, building their footprint, their voice, amplifying their voices, giving the knowledge, information about modern-day practices. When raising children with internet and wi-fi, social media, violence, GBV, so many things that these elderly people have to address when raising children. We provide programmes where we strengthen the role of grandparents raising grandchildren and recognise the importance of this vulnerable, marginalised, often excluded population of people who are the heroes of South Africa,' she said. Simmonds said the initiative, which started during the Covid-19 lockdown, has funded more than 10 programmes with about 400 beneficiaries. She said the grandparents are identified through local schools and organisations. TimesLIVE
Zawya
12-07-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Orange Jordan continues empowering persons with disabilities
Orange Jordan continues to strengthen its pioneering role in empowering persons with disabilities and enhancing their digital and social inclusion through its umbrella of solutions and initiatives, "Differently Abled, Definitely Enabled." As part of this commitment, Orange Jordan supported a specialized training titled "The Art of Dialogue Management," organized by Al-Ataa Club Sport for the Blind at the Orange Digital Village, with the participation of more than 20 persons with visual disabilities. The training focused on deepening participants' understanding of the rights of persons with disabilities, with a particular emphasis on visual impairment. It also aimed to raise awareness around psychological and social challenges, encourage the use of positive and inclusive language, and promote a culture of constructive and open dialogue. By fostering collaboration and mutual support, the program helped reinforce the values of equality and social justice among participants. The training aimed to enhance participants' understanding of the rights of persons with disabilities, especially those with visual impairments. It also focused on raising awareness of the psychological and social impacts, empowering them to use positive and inclusive language, and promoting a culture of constructive dialogue. Additionally, the training emphasized fostering a spirit of cooperation and mutual support, contributing to strengthening values of equality and social justice. The training also included developing digital awareness campaigns and programs. In addition, 20% of the participants were selected to help create podcast content in collaboration with specialized producers, aiming to deliver their messages in innovative and impactful ways. Through supporting this initiative, Orange Jordan reaffirmed its ongoing commitment to promoting digital inclusion and providing equal opportunities for all. The company emphasized its belief that empowering persons with disabilities strengthens the values of equality and tolerance, contributing to building a more inclusive and just society. It is worth noting that through its diverse initiatives and programs, Orange Jordan continues to solidify its position as a leading, responsible digital provider and a key supporter of community development. The company reaffirms its commitment to supporting and empowering persons with disabilities, providing them with opportunities for active participation and enabling them to realize their full potential within society. To learn more, please visit our website: About Orange Jordan Orange Jordan, with over 1800 employees across nearly 300 shops and locations throughout Jordan, strives to provide the best customer experience through an integrated set of digital solutions including fixed lines, mobile lines, internet, data, and Smart Life Solutions to around 4.6 million customers in Jordan. Orange Jordan is a subsidiary of Orange Global Group, which is present in 26 countries worldwide. In line with the Group's strategy 'Lead the Future' and through its positioning as a true responsible digital leader, Orange Jordan supports the national digital transformation vision. Orange Jordan prioritizes community service, and in this context, it implements a comprehensive CSR strategy that revolves around 4 pillars including digital education, digital inclusion, entrepreneurship, climate, and environment. In addition to serving individual customers, Orange Jordan offers tailored solutions for businesses through its sub-brand, (Orange Business). To learn more, please visit our website: About Orange Orange is one of the world's leading telecommunications operators with revenues of 40.3 billion euros in 2024 and 127,000 employees worldwide at 31 December 2024, including 71,000 employees in France. The Group has a total customer base of 291 million customers worldwide at 31 December 2024, including 253 million mobile customers and 22 million fixed broadband customers. These figures account for the deconsolidation of certain activities in Spain following the creation of MASORANGE. The Group is present in 26 countries (including non-consolidated countries). Orange is also a leading provider of global IT and telecommunication services to multinational companies under the brand Orange Business. In February 2023, the Group presented its strategic plan "Lead the Future", built on a new business model and guided by responsibility and efficiency. "Lead the Future" capitalizes on network excellence to reinforce Orange's leadership in service quality.
Zawya
10-07-2025
- Business
- Zawya
ELEVATE expands worldwide as ICAIRE aims to empower 25,000 women in AI
The International Center for Artificial Intelligence Research and Ethics (ICAIRE), a UNESCO Category II Center based in Riyadh, has officially launched the second phase of its global initiative, ELEVATE, aimed at training 25,000 women worldwide in artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. Developed in collaboration with Microsoft, the initiative provides women across the globe with access to practical AI training, mentorship by international experts, and globally recognized certifications — all designed to foster inclusive participation in the digital economy. This initiative reflects ICAIRE's commitment to promoting equal access to future skills, advancing responsible innovation, and addressing the global gender gap in the AI field. The program is open to women from all educational and cultural backgrounds and is delivered in English through a flexible virtual platform to ensure wide accessibility. Participants will gain knowledge in machine learning, computer vision, cloud computing, data analysis, and AI ethics, while also benefiting from personalized mentorship and opportunities to apply AI in real-world contexts. 'ELEVATE is not just a training program — it's a global movement to empower women with the tools, confidence, and opportunities to shape the future of technology,' said the ICAIRE team. Women around the world can now register for free at:
Mail & Guardian
06-07-2025
- Business
- Mail & Guardian
Digital technology must speak African languages
(Graphic: John McCann/M&G) Every year on 25 May, Africa Day is observed to celebrate the continent's strength and rich cultural heritage. But it is also a day that reminds us how far we still have to go. Across Africa, many still face daily struggles with unemployment, poverty and inadequate access to basic services. Less visible, but just as urgent, is another kind of inequality: language. As governments increasingly connect with citizens through digital platforms, millions are left out, partly because the technology does not speak their language. Africa is home to more than 2 000 languages and a vibrant linguistic and cultural tradition, yet its civic tech infrastructure remains stubbornly monolingual. In a world where artificial intelligence (AI) and digital tools increasingly mediate civic engagement, leaving out African languages in these platforms is both a technical oversight and a governance failure. Civic technology (civic tech) refers to digital tools used to promote citizen engagement, government transparency and public participation. From apps that track service delivery to platforms that allow people to report corruption and access public services, civic tech is important for participatory democracy. But what happens when the very people these tools are meant to serve and empower cannot understand them? The reality is that most African civic tech platforms are designed in English or French, the languages of former colonial powers. This excludes most citizens who are more comfortable in indigenous languages such as Swahili, Yoruba or isiZulu. In most cases, English is the default interface language, even in countries where only a minority speak English fluently. A key reason for this dominance is that English is the primary language of the internet, where most training data for language technologies used in digital tools comes from. Natural language processing (NLP), the AI subfield that allows machines to understand and generate human language, depends on large, annotated datasets. These are widely available for English but rarely for African languages, many of which are considered ' Tech developers often lack the training, tools or funding to build NLP models for these languages, especially when faced with the added complexity of dialectal variation, oral traditions and frequent code-switching. Another reason is that civic tech initiatives and efforts are often concentrated in developed urban areas, where English tends to be the main language of communication. This creates a situation where digital governance tools are more responsive to elites and uphold old hierarchies. The other barrier is institutional. In many cases, language inclusion is often an afterthought in civic tech development, with design decisions made by teams that do not consider the linguistic realities of the users they serve. This disconnect is worsened by the inadequacy of language policies or government mandates requiring digital platforms to support indigenous languages. As a result, civic tech ends up amplifying the voices of those already heard (urban, educated and English-speaking) while muting those on the margins. Take South Africa, for instance. It has 11 official spoken languages and the Post-apartheid reforms may have constitutionally elevated African languages, but digital systems have not caught up. Language inequity is being replicated in digital space, and this often results in diminished civic participation, poor service uptake and distrust in institutions. These problems are worse in rural areas, where literacy in former colonial languages is low. In Kenya, for example, citizen feedback platforms like Ushahidi have struggled to reach monolingual Swahili speakers. In Nigeria, digital voting education tools often exclude Hausa, Igbo or Yoruba, creating information asymmetries in the democratic process. In Ethiopia, the dominance of Amharic-based civic systems means that minority language speakers in Oromia or Tigray are digitally disenfranchised. There are growing efforts across the continent to localise AI and digital governance tools, and, equally, lessons to learn from these initiatives. The Masakhane project, for example, is a pan-African research initiative developing machine translation models for African languages. In Rwanda, Kinyarwanda-language platforms are being integrated into agriculture extension services, enabling farmers to get weather forecasts and pricing in real time. Open-source solutions are also important. Projects such as Mozilla Common Voice have crowdsourced voice data in several African languages. These community-collected datasets can help train AI and language technologies to understand under-resourced languages, bypassing the expensive proprietary route. As these efforts grow, so does the need to centre accessibility and inclusion from the very beginning of civic tech projects. Mark Renja, project manager at Code for Africa, Others in the civic tech space echo this view. 'We are quick to condemn inaccessibility in the physical space because it is glaring, but we are making the digital space inaccessible because we think it doesn't matter,' Professor Mpho Primus, co-director of the Institute of AI Systems at the University of Johannesburg, argues that the rise of the Fifth Industrial Revolution (a shift focused on ethics, collaboration and human-centred AI) provides a key opportunity for change. She explains that this new paradigm corresponds with Africa's pluralistic and multilingual societies, if we choose to embrace it. She notes that integrating African languages into emerging technologies would not only help bridge the digital divide but could also position the continent as a leader in shaping ethical AI development. 'The push toward human-centred AI requires linguistic inclusion to be at the forefront,' says Primus. Importantly, there is a strong case for governments to mandate the inclusion of indigenous languages in all e-governance systems. This includes local language support in digital identity systems, chatbots, mobile apps and voting education platforms. Multilingual support should not be viewed as a 'feature' but as a default standard, much like data protection or accessibility for persons with disabilities. Donors and international development partners also have a role to play. Too often civic tech funding is tied to short-term performance metrics (number of users, clicks or reports filed) rather than long-term inclusivity. But trust is the foundation on which civic tech succeeds and delivers. If marginalised communities do not trust the system or the institutions behind it, the technology will either fail or exacerbate inequalities. Language inclusion is one way to build that trust. A multilingual platform may be slower to scale in the short term, but it is more likely to foster trust, uptake, and resilience. Funders must be willing to back projects that prioritise inclusion over convenience, invest in research that improves the quality and availability of language data and support programmes that connect technology, governance and language inclusion. Finally, we must reframe language not as a barrier, but as an enabler. African languages are rich in nuance, metaphor and centuries of indigenous knowledge. When we include them in civic tech, we are making tools more accessible and meaningful. Imagine an AI tool that interprets a proverb-laden community feedback report in Tshivenda, or a chatbot that explains land tenure in Wolof using culturally grounded analogies. Those are the kind of tech that truly speaks to people. As AI becomes central to everything from taxation to public service delivery, the cost of exclusion will grow. Civic tech needs to be built with more voices at the table, especially from communities that speak lesser-known or low-resource African languages. A digital state that cannot speak the language of its people is a state that cannot hear them either. Nnaemeka Ohamadike is a senior data analyst at Good Governance Africa.
Zawya
03-07-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Orange Middle East and Africa Releases its 2024 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Report: 'Cultivating Impact' for Inclusive and Sustainable Development
Orange Middle East and Africa (OMEA) ( unveils its 2024 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report. Entitled 'Cultivating Impact', the report illustrates Orange's commitment to a sustainable, inclusive transformation grounded in the realities of the 17 countries in which the brand operates. A transformation rooted in usage, skills, and territories The report comes at a pivotal time for Africa and the Middle East, where digital, energy, economic and financial transitions are driving deep and progressive societal shifts. One clear guiding principle emerges: human-centered digital technology. It takes shape in everyday uses, built on access to resilient, optimized, and low-carbon digital infrastructure, and a strong commitment to the circular economy through the recovery, refurbishment, and recycling of network and mobile equipment allowing millions to fully experience the digital age, even in the most remote areas. This transformation is accelerated by solutions such as Max it, OMEA's super-app as a new lever for inclusion, Orange Money and Orange Bank Africa for financial inclusion, and Orange Energies for energy inclusion. A commitment rooted in the realities of Africa and the Middle East Throughout the report, OMEA's role as a key player in regional transformation is reflected in a clear and committed vision: a development model that combines economic performance with social responsibility. In the 17 countries where the Group operates, Orange works closely with local realities to meet the specific needs of each territory. Driven by its 18,000 employees, this shared ambition is embodied in the company's operations and in the #OrangeEngageforChange program, which rallies employees around high-impact, socially driven projects. This culture of impact is also reflected in the millions of opportunities made available to youth, women, and entrepreneurs through free inclusion initiatives like the Orange Digital Centers, which have already trained and supported 1.2 million people. The company's commitment also translates into concrete actions in health, culture, ecosystem preservation, and community resilience. Yasser Shaker, CEO of Orange Middle East and Africa, comments: 'Cultivating impact means anchoring our mission in people's daily lives by turning our commitments into meaningful, lasting actions. In 2025 we will continue, together, to accelerate this positive transformation to build a fairer, more inclusive, and more resilient future.' Asma Ennaifer, Executive Director, CSR, Orange Digital Center and Communications for Orange Middle East and Africa, concludes: 'Our responsibility is to act in a way that is concrete, measurable, and aligned with local challenges. Every action we take only matters if it brings tangible progress for women, youth, entrepreneurs, and the communities we serve.' To discover and download Orange Middle East and Africa's 2024 CSR report: Rapport RSE OMEA 2024 - EN ( Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Orange Middle East and Africa. Press contact: Stella Fumey About Orange Middle-East and Africa (OMEA): Orange is present in 18 countries in Africa and the Middle East and has 161 million customers at 31 December 2024. With 7.7 billion euros of revenues in 2024, Orange MEA is the first growth area in the Orange group. Orange Money, its flagship mobile-based money transfer and financial services offer is available in 17 countries and has more than 100 million customers. Orange, multi-services operator, key partner of the digital transformation provides its expertise to support the development of new digital services in Africa and the Middle East.
