Innovative Secondary Education For Skills Enhancement

Innovations Targeting
Excluded Populations
One of the most innovative programs identified in the
ISESE competition was a program that provides advanced
ICT skills to a particularly marginalized population in Vietnam—students
with disabilities. The program not only
provides training and employment opportunities to this
excluded population, but also provides the opportunity for
social mobility.
IT Training for Youth with
Disabilities (Vietnam)
This IT training program, implemented by Catholic Relief
Services, seeks to address the lack of employment opportunities
for people with disabilities in Vietnam by providing
them with advanced technical training, soft-skills
training, and business linkages.
Approach. The program aims to bridge physical, financial,
and societal barriers that prevent youth with disabilities
from receiving quality education and training. The program
provides advanced IT skills in training modules that
last from three to 12 months, and works to provide job
placement at the end of training. The program has solicited
the cooperation of employers to form the curriculum
and facilitate recruitment of trained graduates.
Training includes IT skills such as programming, website
development, graphic design, and network administration,
as opposed to basic IT skills such as data entry, which
increases these students’ options for employment and also
reverses society stigma about the capacity of people with
disabilities. The training also includes development of soft
skills such as teamwork, communication, problem solving,
and confidence building, which complements the technical
training and prepares students for work in a modern
workplace.
Scale and Impact. The program has trained approximately
550 youth with disabilities in advanced IT skills, and
more than 80 percent of those trained have found employment
after graduation. Salaries obtained by graduates are
generally higher than those of the manual labor/handicraft
jobs traditionally assigned to people with disabilities.
Cost and Sustainability. Advanced IT training costs
approximately US$250 per student per month, including
tuition, activities, and room and board. Funding currently
comes from USAID, but the project is currently recruiting
funding from the government, fundraising, partnerships
with the private sector, and student loan programs.
Graduates from the training program make approximately
US$100 to US$200 per month more than they would at
an entry-level job in a manual labor/handicraft trade, so a
loan system would be a feasible means of support to the
school, if the government or private sector partnerships
would insure the loan.
Innovative Models for Skills Enhancement in Africa and Asia 57