CRS ICT4D Conference

Save the Children China focuses on a youth population that is huge but invisible: migrant youth. Sixty percent of the 150 million migrants in China are under the age of 30, forming a growing urban underclass. Migrant youth are separated from family, denied health and housing benefits and education, and vulnerable to abuse. Most of them work at hazardous, low paying, semi-skilled jobs. Few migrants know their rights or employment options. With at most a middle school education, migrant youth face an array of information, financial and access barriers to vocational training that could enable them to move into skilled, safe, and higher paying work. Save the Children empowers migrant youth aged 16-25  to become economically and socially productive citizens -- contributing to their families, building their communities, and ending the inter-generational cycle of poverty. 

In 2014, Save the Children pioneered a breakthrough ICT innovation, a mobile app enabling migrant youth to learn the skills they need to get a better job. Many work fulltime and thus have limited time to go to a classroom. They are socially excluded and not affiliated with schools, youth clubs, or government initiatives. But 80% of them have smartphones and a strong wireless network, and most play video games on their mobile phones for up to 3 hours a day.  So Save digitized its skills curriculum and brought its eLearning modules on career planning, job searching, and communications to the palm of migrant youth's hands. 
In this session, we demonstrate the mobile app and the eLearning modules and how the system is integrated with a job portal to vastly expand our ability to link youth with jobs. We discuss how this ICT breakthrough helped the program solve its main challenges: migrant youth are difficult and expensive to reach, and lack time and networking skills.