Niger: Empowering Young People through health and climate programs
Collaborating with the government to develop and scale locally developed DPGs that improve outcomes across health and future-forward learning
UNICEF Niger worked with Agence Nationale pour la Société de l’information (ANSI) on strengthening government-led support to locally developed digital public goods (DPGs) in education and health.
Activities included the support for the establishment of an African Drone and Data Academy (ADDA) in Niger and the development of an additional curriculum module specific to the needs within the Sahel region. The activity also included the translation of part of the core ADDA curriculum to French. These courses will help create a trained drone operations workforce in support of public health initiatives alongside climate change adaptation and mitigation in line with Niger’s national strategies for technical and vocational training and education (TVET) and the national civil aviation objectives.
This work is a collaboration between UNICEF Niger, ANSI, Agence National de l'Aviation Civile (ANAC), and UNICEF ESARO, working with the contractor Virginia Tech University as the curriculum developer. The activity is helping to make the training modules more accessible to francophone speakers and young people in the sub-region.
To date, the project has trained five Nigerien trainers preparing them as future instructors for the Nigerien academy. Instructor training included a 5-week, in-person training at the ADDA in Malawi with the host institution Malawi University of Science and Technology. Overall, 16 youth from Niger have graduated from the level 1 curriculum, and six youth have completed the advanced level 2 curriculum training. 60% of the graduates are female.
In September 2022, the first cohort of up to 24 Nigerien youth will be the first to learn with the recently translated French online curriculum. The academy is currently being implemented by presidential decree in Niger and the first in-person flying training is planned for the fall of 2022.
Two of the courses that have been nominated as DPGs, the Data Visualization and Cartography course and the Remotely Piloted Aircraft Technology course, are currently evaluated and adapted in line with the DPG standard.
One challenge that the project has encountered is that nominations for individual courses are not currently accepted as DPGs. As a result, the project is partnering up with platforms such as UNICEF's AGORA to publish content that can support the DPG standard.
