Former students from the Reaching the Unreached Programme, likely to benefit from the Cisco ITE Curriculum

In its mission to promote women’s access to and use of ICTs as tools for social, economic and political advancement, the African Centre for Women, Information Communication Technology has partnered with CISCO to introduce an advanced ICT training to scale up its Youth Employability Programme.

CISCO, a multinational corporation in networking and communications technology products and services has awarded ACWICT the Cisco Academy Certificate to run the training.

The Cisco IT Essentials Curriculum aims at providing an in-depth exposure to computer Hardware and Operating Systems. The training targets women who have basic IT skills or those who have already gone through ACWICT’ s ICT, Life skills and Entrepreneurship training under the ‘Reaching the Unreached’ programme who are looking to further their knowledge in ICT.

As is the case with the ongoing program, life skills training will lay the foundation of all the other trainings. The training will focus on further skills for employability and everyday life. The project will also promote youth entrepreneurship as a viable employment option. To this extent, the program will continue providing business support services to beneficiaries including linking program them to financial resources for self employment. A total of 500 young women who are graduates of our ongoing youth employment program will benefit from this new and expanded initiative over the three year period.

The training is structured to meet the increasing demand for skilled labor emerging with the growth of the ICT sector in Kenya since the liberalization of the telecommunication sector in 1999. The growth, which has mainly been recorded in mobile telephony, Internet Service, and telecommunications sub-sectors, has created new job opportunities and a large demand for skilled professionals in different sub-sectors of the ICT industry.

The training will be led by Certified Cisco Instructors with practical sessions in a Cisco approved lab. The students will also have access to Cisco’s most current ITE curriculum (Ver 4) and exams. The ITE course will be extensively and thoroughly covered in six weeks.