<aside> 🇺🇳 The intention of these courses is two-fold.

One, level the playing field by teaching women the needle-mover skills that aren't taught conventionally like reproductive health, and legal rights.

Two, teach the basic competencies to enable them to acquire the skills so to promote informed life choices which would later be valued by employers and useful for self-employment. For example, financial literacy courses and critical-thinking practice.

</aside>

Which courses are in demand?

Issues like internet speed and copyright have made it difficult for some countries to embrace the idea of massive open online courses. To address this challenge, the text-based course recommendations we list, take into account: the medium, skills that might be most in-demand given forecasted growth industries [1], and several inputs from people on the ground we've spoken with in Cape Town and Johannesburg.

From our research, we've found that the top three in-demand courses for South African women are:

1. Reproductive health education

   <aside> ‼️ Why this? Young women do not get even the most basic sexuality education and that misinformation about sex and its consequences remains common. [2] Indeed, implementing comprehensive sexuality education programs remains a challenge in many developing nations due to government and community friction. Thus, we propose an opt-in course through a text-based medium to bypass regulatory friction.

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   • How to minimize unintended pregnancy through contraception
   • How to minimize chances of infant mortality
   • Proper techniques for effective child-care
   • Women's legal rights to prevent and handle gender-based violence

2. English (official language in South Africa) and critical thinking skills

   <aside> ‼️ Why this? More than 80 percent of the entire working age population in Ghana and more than 60 percent in Kenya cannot infer simple information from relatively easy texts. [3] A lack of language and thinking skills has wide negative implications, from loss of career opportunities and financial resources. [4]

   </aside>

   • Learn english to function effectively in academic contexts
   • Developing critical-literacy skills to interpret the world around them
   • Strategies to avoid errors in decision-making
   • Promoting to support strength in reasoning

English and critical thinking skills

Goals

• use English to achieve academically in both university and high school [5]
• use English effectively to advocate for themselves in all areas of their lives [5]
• make a successful transition to their chosen postsecondary destination (work, apprenticeship, college, university) [5]
• function effectively in a society increasingly committed to the use of information technology [5]
• learn to interface with english-dominant ICT industries (ex. web development, mobile-app development, cloud systems engineer, etc.) to build in-demand technical skills.
• use critical-literacy and critical-thinking skills to interpret the world around them [5]

Potential Curriculum Outline

The following curriculum recommendation is largely inspired by The Ministry of Education in Ontario. We recommend this because it has been successfully implemented in Ontario, and Australia for the ESL (English as a second language) program. After looking through the material, we found that a lot of the same principles can be applied through a text-based format to ESL learners in South Africa.

• Reading + critical literacy (course 1)
• Writing (course 2)
• Critical thinking through Insight Assessment [8] (course 3)

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