Connecting Uganda’s communities: How Hello World is creating confident digital users in Uganda

As digital connectivity becomes more essential to daily life, communities worldwide are seeking ways to not only access technology but also use it meaningfully and safely. In Uganda, Hello World is spearheading a new initiative across six regional hubs to boost digital skills, confidence, and safety. This project isn’t just about teaching tech skills—it’s about creating a sustainable, community-driven model that empowers individuals to embrace the digital world on their terms.

By equipping local community support officers with training skills and customizing the curriculum to the needs of each region, Hello World is building on its existing digital infrastructure to ensure long-term digital adoption and resilience. Through this program, 200 participants will become confident, skilled digital users who will, in turn, inspire and train countless others in their communities. Join us as we explore how this transformative project is shaping the future of digital inclusion in Uganda.

Empowering Ugandan communities with digital skills and safety tools

This project equips Hub community members across 6 regions in Uganda with the digital awareness, confidence, skills and online safety strategies to enable them to use the Hub and other digital tools meaningfully and safely. This responds to low digital literacy levels assessed in Hub communities and the need to accompany Hello World’s existing digital infrastructure with digital literacy training. The project will extend the impact and sustainability of Hello World’s existing digital literacy training project by training further community trainers and optimizing the existing curriculum for the needs of Hub communities, with a specific focus on digital safety and long term digital adoption. With 200 direct beneficiaries, the project will indirectly reach thousands more in the Hub communities trained over time, and create a resource ready to share with other Hub countries, including Hubs in Nigeria and Burundi.

Strategic regional focus

Hello Hubs are established across these 6 regions, and Hello World are working to train all Hubs in each region- training each Hub community support officer (CSO) to deliver the training themselves, one by one. They’re using this method (of the regional manager delivering the initial training- and then handing it over to the CSO) in order to ensure high quality standardized training across all Hubs and so that they can provide the CSO with an example of how the training should be conducted. 

The project is training 6 Hubs which have already received a ‘first round’ of training and then 6 new Hubs. Each of the Hubs has been selected by the regional managers, who have a deep understanding of the needs of each Hub community. They have selected these communities because of their need for extra digital literacy training, so that particular groups have the skills to use the Hubs more meaningfully.

Building digital skills, confidence, and safety

The training is proudly comprehensive, in order to deal with the multiple barriers that communities face getting online. Therefore, Hello World delivers a layered training which includes digital awareness, digital confidence building, digital skills, digital safety and finally, digital adoption. In the adoption stage, they focus on supporting each user to consider how they would like to use the internet for their own benefit, which is always unique to each individual.

Digital skills for lasting impact

This training will support participants to use the Hub in a way which is more meaningful to them. It will also encourage community members who have never used the Hub before, either because they don’t understand its usefulness or because they lack the skills or confidence to use it, to come and benefit from the Hub. Additionally, each individual participant is expected to increase their digital literacy level as a result of this project, which will be measured at the beginning and end of the project.

A sustainable vision for digital literacy across Africa

The long term vision of this project is that communities will have the skills and capacity to deliver this training themselves without the need of support from Hello World. Communities already have the digital infrastructure, so this project simply works to increase the community’s ability to use it, and use it more inclusively and meaningfully. Additionally, throughout this project, Hello World will work to update and improve their digital literacy curriculum, so that it can be used by Hub communities in other countries, including in Nigeria, where they worked on a Hub building project in 2023/4 with 48percent.

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