World Youth Skills Day was observed on 15 July under the theme “Skills for a shared future.” It is a useful theme, and it deserves a harder look than an anniversary usually gets.
Skills are no longer an addition to a curriculum vitae. They are the bridge between education and opportunity, between ambition and income, between a young woman’s potential and her actual access to the economy. And as the global conversation about youth skills grows louder, one thing needs saying plainly.
The skills gap is a gender gap.
Not as a slogan. As a finding, one that UNESCO, the International Labour Organization, and the World Bank have now documented at every stage of the journey a young woman takes from a classroom to a payslip. This is what that evidence shows, and what Women Impacting Nigeria believes it requires of us.
We have said for years that the skills gap is a gender gap. The evidence has now caught up with us, and it is less comfortable than the slogan. It shows the gap opening in at least four places, and only one of them is a classroom.
— Adesuwa Imasekha, Founder and President, Women Impacting Nigeria
What the Evidence Actually Shows
Read the data through a gender lens, and the disparity appears at every stage.
It starts before the classroom.
UNESCO’s 2024 Gender Report, Technology on Her Terms, found that in sub-Saharan Africa, for every 100 men with spreadsheet skills, only 40 to 44 women have the same proficiency. Not advanced skills: a spreadsheet. World Bank analysis puts the scale of what rests on this in stark terms: an estimated 230 million jobs in the region will require digital skills by 2030, while more than 190 million women here are not using mobile internet at all.
It continues into technical education.
UNESCO reports that women make up 35 per cent of STEM graduates globally, a figure that has barely moved in ten years. Representation narrows further in the workforce: 26 percent in data and artificial intelligence, 15 percent in engineering, 12 percent in cloud computing.
It persists even among women who are fully qualified.
This is the finding that should reshape how we all design programmes, and it is the one least often quoted. UNESCO reports that in the European Union, only one in four women holding an information technology degree entered a digital occupation — compared with more than one in two men.
These are women who already have the degree. The training worked. And they still enter digital work at roughly half the rate of men holding the same qualification. This evidence is European, and comparable Nigerian data does not yet exist at the same quality, so we should be careful about assuming the exact ratio travels. But the direction is unmistakable: a qualification does not open the door for a woman the way it does for a man. What happens after training, hiring practice, professional networks, access to capital, and unpaid care work — does much of the deciding.
And it compounds into exclusion from work altogether.
The ILO’s Global Employment Trends for Youth 2024 found that 28.1 percent of young women globally are outside employment, education, or training, against 13.1 percent of young men. More than double.
So World Youth Skills Day cannot be a routine event on a calendar. Held honestly, it is a reckoning — with a gap that opens before school, widens through it, survives graduation, and ends in exclusion.
A certificate is not a job. We have been counting graduates and calling it progress. The honest measure is how many of those young women are earning three years later, and almost nobody in this s
Digital and AI Skills Are No Longer Distant Opportunities
Digital literacy no longer lives in the IT department. It is how businesses operate, how public services are delivered, and how individuals earn. From data analysis and product management to digital marketing, coding, content, and customer support, technology now defines what it means to be economically active.
Artificial intelligence has moved just as fast, from futuristic luxury to everyday necessity. It is reorganising healthcare, finance, agriculture, education, and business systems as we speak. If young women are not equipped to understand, navigate, and direct these tools, they will be positioned as passive consumers of technology rather than its creators, builders, operators, and decision-makers.
There is an urgency here that deserves to be stated precisely rather than dramatically. In March 2026, the ILO found that female-dominated occupations are almost twice as exposed to generative AI as male-dominated ones, 29 percent against 16 percent, because women are concentrated in exactly the routine clerical and administrative roles automation reaches first. The ILO’s judgement is that AI will transform tasks more than it eliminates jobs. But that is not reassurance. It is instruction. A young woman who directs these tools is strengthened by them. A young woman whose tasks are the tools’ tasks is not.
Which is why real technology education must go beyond digital awareness. It has to build the capacity to think critically, define problems, judge whether an output is wrong, and apply technology responsibly towards her own goals. Tools now have a shelf life measured in months. Judgment does not.
When a young woman is genuinely equipped, she does not simply secure a job. She gains financial independence, leadership capacity, and the confidence to navigate an economy that will change several more times in her working life.
We are not preparing young women for a fixed set of jobs. Those jobs will change three times before their careers are over. We are preparing them to keep their footing each time it happens.
— Adesuwa Imasekha, Founder and President, Women Impacting Nigeria
WIN Academy: Turning Learning Into Practical Growth
Rhetoric does not close gaps. Intervention has to be local, structured, and accountable. That is the mandate behind the WIN Academy, a 12-month journey for women and girls, built from Women Impacting Nigeria’s long-standing commitment to equipping women with the tools, mentorship, resources, and frameworks that sustain long-term economic growth.
The Academy covers digital literacy, financial capability, leadership development and business innovation. Its design answers directly to the evidence above.
- Relevant. Aligned to what the corporate and technology sectors actually hire for, not to what is convenient to teach, and weighted towards transferable capability over proficiency in any single tool.
- Applied. Built on projects and portfolios rather than certificates alone. A portfolio is evidence; a certificate is a claim. Where the data shows women’s credentials converting at half the rate of men’s, evidence travels further.
- Connected. Mentors, peer networks, and direct employment and entrepreneurial pathways as the core mechanism, not as enrichment. If the gap persists after qualification, then what happens after qualification is the intervention.
Through the Academy, young women in technology and business move from classroom concepts to market-ready execution, and gain the confidence to lead in their own communities.
WIN’s Commitment to Women’s Empowerment Through Skills
WIN continues to advocate for sustainable empowerment through localised programmes, grassroots initiatives, leadership development and policy advocacy. Empowerment cannot survive on inspiration alone. It requires functional capability — and the systems that let capability convert into income.
That work rests on our Community Clusters, active across all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, each led by a Cluster Lead who lives in the community she serves. The Clusters deliver digital access, financial literacy, trade skills, health resources, and they count, gathering gender-disaggregated data on what women are actually doing, learning and earning.
The counting matters more than it sounds. UNESCO reports that 68 per cent of countries have policies supporting STEM education, but only about half of those policies specifically name girls and women. In a labour market where equally qualified women convert at half the rate of men, a policy that does not name them is not neutral in effect. And a sector that measures enrolment but not earnings cannot tell which of its programmes work. We would like to help fix that, and we accept being measured by the same standard.
Ask us how many women we trained and we can tell you. Ask how many are earning, still in the sector, and hiring other women three years from now — and the whole sector goes quiet. That question is the work.
Our position, on World Youth Skills Day and every other day, is unchanged: young women must not be left out of the global skills conversation. They must be integrated intentionally and systematically — into digital literacy, AI readiness, entrepreneurship and technology education. And the people who hold the doors on the other side must open them.
Because when we equip a young woman with digital skills, we do not only change her trajectory. We shift the economic baseline of her community, and of the nation.
Get Involved
Women aged 18 to 40: applications for the WIN Academy cohort are open. Apply today.
Employers and partners: the most valuable thing you can offer is not a donation. It is a door, a placement, a mentor, a first contract. Partner with us: partnerships@womenimpactingnigeria.org .
Policymakers and researchers: our Cluster network generates gender-disaggregated data across 37 locations. Let us build the evidence base together.
Frequently Asked Questions
Because the disparity appears at every stage. UNESCO reports that in sub-Saharan Africa, for every 100 men with spreadsheet skills, only 40 to 44 women have the same proficiency; that women are 35 per cent of STEM graduates globally and 26 per cent of the data and AI workforce; and that even among IT graduates in the EU, only one in four women entered a digital occupation compared with more than one in two men. The ILO reports that 28.1 per cent of young women globally are outside employment, education or training, against 13.1 per cent of young men.
Not on its own. Access is a genuine barrier, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. But UNESCO’s finding that equally qualified women enter digital occupations at roughly half the rate of men shows that barriers persist after training — including hiring practices, professional networks, access to capital and unpaid care responsibilities. Training is necessary. The evidence says it is not sufficient.
Artificial intelligence is reorganising healthcare, finance, agriculture, education and business systems now. The ILO also finds female-dominated occupations are almost twice as exposed to generative AI as male-dominated ones (29 per cent against 16 per cent), because women are concentrated in routine clerical and administrative roles. Young women who can direct these tools are strengthened by them; those whose tasks the tools perform are not.
The WIN Academy is a 12-month programme from Women Impacting Nigeria for women aged 18 to 40, covering digital literacy, financial capability, leadership and business innovation. It is designed around mentorship, portfolios and direct employment and entrepreneurial pathways — because the evidence shows the gap persists after qualification, not only before it.
When young women gain digital skills and convert them into income, it advances SDG 5 (Gender Equality) and SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth). The World Bank estimates 230 million jobs in sub-Saharan Africa will require digital skills by 2030, while over190 million women in the region are not using mobile internet — making digital inclusion central to regional economic resilience.
“Skills for a shared future,” observed on 15 July 2026 and led by the United Nations with UNESCO and the ILO, with emphasis on technical, digital, AI, green and social-emotional skills.
Written by: Founder, Women Impacting Nigeria- Adesuwa Imasekha.