Managed by the World Wide Web Foundation and supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the EQUALS Digital Skills Fund will support a range of capacity-building trainings to advance women’s digital skills, active citizenship, and civic participation through technology.

About the EQUALS Digital Skills Fund

The EQUALS Digital Skills Fund — a partnership between the World Wide Web Foundation, the EQUALS Global Partnership, and Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development will provide financial resources to local initiatives providing gender-sensitive skills training across countries in the Global South. Learn more about the Fund and its goals.

Grants ranging from €5,000- €15,000 will be awarded to existing initiatives, housed within a registered organisation or entity, to scale up their digital skills programs and trainings and to work to ensure a lasting impact beyond the lifecycle of the grant and the initiative.

	Meet the grantees!				Contribute to the Fund
	The EQUALS digital skills funds have now been awarded Meet the grantees!				Want to contribute financially to the Fund, or provide in-kind support? Get in touch: digitalskillsfund@webfoundation.org.

Why Digital Skills?

As our daily lives move increasingly into the digital realm, it is clear that to be offline today is to be excluded. For this reason, it is more critical than ever that everyone — regardless of gender, location or income — has the ability to access and use the internet. Unfortunately, the reality is that half the world is still offline, and the majority of those offline are women. Failure to close this digital divide — and the digital gender gap in particular — threatens to reinforce existing offline patterns of inequality and to undermine global economic growth and development. A myriad of challenges compound to keep women from unlocking the true potential of ICTs, including the high cost to connect (particularly given that women, on average, earn less than men) to cultural barriers to online access and use. Research, however, has shown that one of the top reasons women are not online is a lack of digital skills and knowledge needed to use the web. In fact, women are nearly 2x more likely than men to report lack of skills as a barrier to internet use. The EQUALS Digital Skills Fund aims to tackle this issue.