“Development through Digitalization” - Empowering Gender Equality, Economic Growth, and Democratic Advancement through Youth Digital Learning.

Empowering underprivileged young pupils, particularly girls, with digital skills is a necessary step towards promoting learning equality among students of diverse gender and socioeconomic backgrounds in Albania. Digitalisation promotes youth inclusion in IT jobs and entrepreneurship and advances students’ compatibility in the labour market--a development that in turn promotes economic growth and democratic values among the region’s developing countries. 

The DTD project covers 26 middle and high schools across 17 villages in Albania and Kosovo. The choice selection is based on grounds of high proportions of underprivileged students and schools’ limited access to digital resources. Despite current digital initiatives in the region, villages remain on the sidelines of academic and digital progress, placing young students who need the most help at a deeper learning disadvantage. Limited digital resources and trained experts to provide digital training to students hinders school’s capacity to narrow the extant gender and digital skill gaps in education. 

The DTD project brings together academics, NGOs and IT experts to establish a platform of interaction among all groups to provide digital resources to village schools and to engage in hands-on teaching practices to help underprivileged students, particularly girls, to build  digital skills. In addition to making a concrete scientific contribution by collecting an original subnational, micro-level dataset on factors related to education and digitalization across the selected villages, the DTD project's broader impacts foresees the advancement of democratic values in the region. By fostering innovation and stimulating economic growth, DTD not only fuels the region's progress but also actively contributes to narrowing gender disparities in education, further promoting inclusivity and equitable access to educational opportunities across the country.