Our aim with this project was to foster digital inclusion of people whose lack of digital skills impedes their participation in society. European Commission data shows that almost half of Europeans (44%) do not have basic digital skills, and at the same time it is predicted that 90% of future jobs will require digital skills. Furthermore, our society is becoming increasingly digital and basic digital skills are needed for daily tasks such as online banking, paying bills, and government services.
Our target groups covered a range of people including, but not limited to, older citizens, migrants, and people from underprivileged background. To accommodate each partner country’s various target groups, the resources produced were adapted to each local context.
Throughout this project, we worked with public libraries, who are ideally placed, to reach out to digitally excluded users.
Our first objective was to train a sample of 80 librarians, notably by providing them with appropriate resources so that they could in turn train the maximum number of digitally excluded people possible in the four countries involved in the pilot: Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands and Poland.
The ultimate objective of the project was to show that the ‘train the trainer’ approach can easily and efficiently be replicated, by all interested European partners in their respective areas of influence making it easier to reach a significant audience.
All resources used for the pilot sessions are available online, under Creative Common licenses, for everyone to use freely and at no cost. The support documents for the training of facilitators are only available in English.
To support and facilitate the dissemination of the resources, the project scaled up and tailored the Voyageurs du Numérique (VDN) (“Digital Travelers”) platform, initially developed by Bibliothèques Sans Frontières France (BSF). The Voyageurs du Numérique programme is a digital awareness programme created by BSF in September 2017.
Digital literacy is now the essential gateway to fully participate in society. It is for everyone to become a digital player or at least to have a conscious and informed use of it that can lead to a real appropriation of the tools.
BSF therefore created Voyageurs du Numérique program in order to support local structures (libraries, popular education associations, socio-cultural leaders) in setting up digital cultural activities by making available a library of activity sheets.