Scaffolding Digital Literacy Through Digital Skills Training for Disabled People in the Global South

Digital inclusion is essential for attaining the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and for ensuring no one is left behind.

In low-and-middle countries (LMICs), people lack the digital skills to access good-quality employment opportunities. It has been shown in other contexts that scaffolding the learning of digital skills can enhance people’s attainment of digital skills; specifically, these interventions target increasing the zones of actual development and independent action. However, to date, fewer studies have looked specifically at the role of digital skills training via smartphones for blind and partially sighted and deaf and hard-of-hearing people in LMICs. We conducted classroom-based training and peer learning through WhatsApp groups for 138 people in India and Kenya.

Our findings emphasise the role of inclusive scaffolding and instructional and community-based peer learning. As such, we present a new digital scaffolding framework for inclusive instructional and peer learning, extending Vygotsky’s Scaffolding Theory.