Empowering Urban Disadvantaged Youth through ICT training: The Case of Nairobits

Many urban youth in slums have limited opportunities for education, training and employment. In recent years, ICT has increasingly been seen as a potential tool to create more opportunities for this group. Many NGOs have come into play, offering ICT training to disadvantaged youth. Usually this focuses on computer and internet training. Nairobits is an NGO in Kenya which in addition to the computer and internet training provides website training. This research is a case study of Nairobi ts with the objective to examine the opportunities created by website training for urban disadvantaged youth and to assess the approaches, achievements and limitations of Nairobits. The training is divided in two parts: WT3 and the media lab. The paper addresses to what extent this way of empowering contributes to the human development of urban disadvantaged youth and whether the intervention lifts these youth out of their marginalised position. Primary data is collected via a questionnaire for the participants as well as interviews with staff, CBOs, managers of companies and a donor. The research shows that Nairobits' training in ICT empowers urban disadvantaged youth through an increase of human, financial and social capital. Regarding human and financial capital, there is however a significant difference between participants who received WT3 and participants who were also trained in the media-lab. For media-lab participants good opportunities are created to access relevant employment in the formal sector whereas the WT3 participants are acquiring non-website related jobs. On the basis of the findings, the study proposes recommendations for more responsive programming.