Empowering through digital skills training: an empirical study of poor unemployed working-age women in India

Abstract

ABSTRACT People with low or no digital literacy may not receive the digital transformation benefits. There are no-cost digital literacy programs to address this gap, whose outcomes need to be studied. Using survey data of 6989 unemployed females living below the poverty line in India, the present paper examines the linkage between the digital skills training program and empowerment. Economic empowerment measured through employment, education and entrepreneurship-seeking behavior, and psychological empowerment are studied. It also assesses the moderating role of perceived value derived from the training and the mediating role of actual skill usage in understanding the linkage. Results show that the moderating role of perceived value is important for economic empowerment and the mediating role of actual usage of learned digital skills is relevant for psychological empowerment. The paper contributes to the ICTD domain by highlighting that digital literacy training may lead to empowerment for poor women.