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Eighty four graduates who are part of the second cohort of the regional Digital Skills for an Innovating East African Industry programme have graduated.
They held a joint graduation that happened in seven of the eight East Africa Community(EAC) member states of Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo(DRC), Tanzania and Uganda.
The programme was not carried out in Somalia because it joined the EAC recently when the programme had already started.
The 84 graduated with short term digital skills courses after 10 days of training and graduation on the same day.
The programme is being implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and Inter-University Council of East Africa (IUCEA).

The project focuses on building capacity, supporting innovation and entrepreneurship, and providing short-term training tailored to the digital transformation needs of the East African Community (EAC) Partner States.
The training is conducted by WINS Global Consult in partnership with Black in Tech with certification by Strathmore University through its research and innovation centre iLabAfrica.
“Through these series of training, our objective is to strengthen the employability of young people in the EAC partner states, but also improve the quality of delivery of digital skills training at the higher institutions and universities,” said Lillian Akot, Communications & Training Advisor, GIZ Tanzania.
Ms Akot was speaking on Friday during the graduation event of the 18 of Kenya’s graduates at Kenya Technical Training Centre(KTTC) in Nairobi.
The graduates received their certificates and shared their experiences and future aspirations.
Under the unemployed university graduates, the programme is designed to empower them with in-demand data analysis, visualisation and narrative generation skills to enhance their employability and career prospects.
At the end of the 10-day, in-person training and online, graduates are equipped with valuable data analysis skills, increased employability, and career opportunities for participants across the EAC.
They undertook Trainings in Data Analytics, Visualisation and Narrative course to graduate.
Ms Akot said the programme also trains university staff to offer them practical and interactive training to strengthen digital skills to offer students a quality education experience catering to market oriented employability and their innovativeness as well as to improve efficiencies of non-teaching staff.
Between July and August 2024, the training brought together over 110 participants (nearly 50 per cent female) from across seven participating EAC countries.
This diverse group represented a mix of teaching staff (professors, lecturers, and teaching assistants) and non-teaching personnel (librarians, registrars, ICT officers, webmasters, quality assurance officers, and systems and network administrators) from more than 35 universities, with five or more institutions participating from each country.
“It helps the graduates to build market expansion strategies while using digital marketing tools among other e-commerce technologies to advertise and promote, content and experience, data and infrastructure, commerce and sales, customer relationship management and governance,” said Emmanuel Kweyu, deputy director at IlabAfrica.
He said Strathmore University was incharge of quality control in terms of design and quality of the curriculum and certification process, delivery of the programme and looking at trainers on delivery so that it meets certain standards to meet expectations of the trainers and of the programme.
Kweyu said the programme is a clear path towards digitisation since the skills they are offering are highly in demand in Kenya and East Africa.
The third cohort training, which will start next week and is designed to expose Micro-, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises(MSMEs) and Small and Medium Enterprises(SMEs) to current trends of marketing technology as a discipline.