Help Venezuelans with digital and media literacy

The digital literacy projects for Venezuelans have been oriented in recent months to direct training processes in which different young people have developed digital skills, from programming using tools such as Arduino, betting on developing skills for employment in programming and web development with training programs in front end and back end, accompanying the training with support in contact with employability, managing to link the majority of the beneficiaries to jobs as junior programmers.

Some of this programs have been oriented to also help people with dissabilities (PCD) and women, reaching more cities and towns, being able to help rural young people to develop abilities in tech used in the 4.0 industry.

In recent months, the efforts of the project to help Venezuelan migrants in Colombia have been aimed at strengthening the call for training in digital skills in programming for web development, with support in the employability process and direct contact with web development companies. . At the moment they are expected to receive different cohorts of training groups to train and help employ young migrants from Venezuela. The calls have been aimed at specific groups of young migrants, as well as people with disabilities, to strengthen digital skills that allow all people to use technology to transform themselves and their environment while learning and developing specifical habilities involving tech.

Activities related to support for Venezuelans have sought to strengthen skills in technological and digital tools, these actions have had as their main focus in recent months to redirect, strengthen, increase and enhance the participation of Venezuelan migrants in Medellín, from the aid project for Venezuelans have increased the participation of Venezuelans in other training projects for children and youth; In the projects that have been strengthened, skills in basic programming, web development, electronics and robotics have been promoted. In other activities, dialogues have been carried out with other organizations to generate alliances that allow to help more Venezuelan migrants and increase the scope of the actions.

One of the main achievements we have had as a result of the donation is generating employment for Venezuelan young people. "Gladys Guzmán" is a Venezuelan girl living in Medellín who found an opportunity to improve her living conditions through technology. 

"Gladys Guzmán" were awarded a scholarship to be part of an intensive programming bootcamp in which she learned about programing languages for front end and back end software development, personal skills, and employability. Now, she is working for a Company as a Fullstack developer and she keeps improving her professional skills and life skills to improve and achieve better results. 

Names have been changed to protect identities. 

Summary: In the last 5 years due to the social, economic and political crisis in Venezuela, the number of Venezuelans who have left the country amounts to 4 million according to figures from the UN Refugee Agency and the IOM. Of these, 1.3 million have arrived to Colombia, and the department of Antioquia is the fifth recipient with close to 72,000, according to data from Colombia Migration. This situation has also affected other neighboring countries such as Brazil and the Region.

This same entity indicates that until January of this year, Venezuelans with PEP (Special Permission to Stay) in the department, the majority, 31,268, are between 18 and 29 years old.

Our goal is to improve the living conditions of migrants by democratizing and facilitating access to information to opportunities and resourses that allow them to meet their basic human development needs. If we build the platform to spread and connect the humanitarian aid with the people needing it, the need of efforts done by all sides working in humanitarian crisis will be reduced, improving the life conditions of migrants currently in need, and other communities that might need help in the future.

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Three meet-ups were held to analyze the information needs, current uses and sources of information to which Venezuelans have access, where they connect to the internet, which media they use, which associations they know and in general, how they find out about the different activities or actions available in the city of Medellín.

After identifying the needs, Makaia in association with Alpha Lumen (organization based in Brazil) started developing a mobile application in which Venezuelans can access reliable and geo-referenced information from organizations (previously validated) that are providing support on issues such as health, education, culture, housing, jobs, and more.

A pre-release event of the app was held in Sao Paulo on October 11 of 2019, where social organizations and students could see advances of the development of the app.

In order to help to maximixe the impact of the project, several meetings with social organizations in Medellín took place since the beginning of the project, building a database of offers of humanitarian help in Medellín and receiving feedback of the organizations to ease the app development as a win-win tool to the people in need and the organizations offering humanitarian help.

Furthermore, digital literacy workshops are planned in order to help the people in need access valuable information using internet. The date for these workshops and also the release date of the app are pending due the national calendar of restrictions in movility programmed for march and april of 2020 to prevent COVID19 spreading.

We as Makaia expect that this project will help the most migrant people in need of humanitarian help as possible, also helping the NGOs to get to their target audiencies, aiming to spread the wellbeing and dignified life for those in need.

¡Don’t miss any detail of this trip of bringing humanitarian help with technology!