Co-creating digital skills training with refugees, for refugees

Published December 2022

To create a digital skills curriculum optimized for refugees’ needs and capacities, UNHCR Indonesia took a refugee-led and community-based approach to designing and delivering training.

Despite the widespread use of digital tools among displaced communities, many refugees and asylum-seekers still face barriers because they lack basic digital skills and digital literacy.

To ensure that refugees can benefit from digital technology, UNHCR has been testing approaches and ideas to improve digital literacy among the people it works with and for.

In Indonesia, UNHCR used a co-creation approach with refugees to develop a basic curriculum. After initial consultations with refugees of different ages, genders, and nationalities, an initial workshop with Refugee-Led Organizations kick-started the outline of a new curriculum.

During the co-creation session, participants identified priority topics for the curriculum, such as how to create accounts, establish secure passwords, and make digital payments.

The session also emphasized the importance of linking the training to refugees’ daily lives: the skills taught should be connected to the everyday benefits for refugees, such as staying in touch with their home country and culture, and finding relevant local information.

Refugees also spoke about the importance of debunking misconceptions and ingrained ideas about digital technology, for instance the perception that the internet is not a place for women and children, or not a place for people in rural areas.

One key takeaway from the consultations was that most refugees (except younger people with existing digital skills) preferred a structured learning course over remote learning. Based on their recommendations and that of the partnering Refugee-Led Organizations, UNHCR shifted its approach in Indonesia to test the delivery of training through existing Refugee Learning Centres rather than individual refugees cascading training in their communities. With this approach, the organizations could take advantage of their networks, processes, and teaching models to further tailor the training to their specific community’s needs.

UNHCR will document the project to determine how effective the digital literacy curriculum is, how the delivery approach works, and how UNHCR can continue co-creating programmes with Refugee-Led Organizations.

These lessons will all feed into ongoing work and initiatives across the organization, including other pilots and work to enhance the digital inclusion of displaced and stateless people as part of UNHCR’s Digital Transformation Strategy.

Read the full blog post about this project.