Since joining forces in 2021, our partnership with Niya, an NGO that focuses on closing the technology skills gap by training the most talented refugees and matching them to opportunities around the world, has supported four tech training cohorts of around 25 participants each, offering access to over 6,000 hours of training and more than 1,500 hours of mentoring.
Niya’s mission is to reinvent the conversation about enforced displacement. People keep seeing this as a problem and not the opportunities available by looking differently at the situation of migration. The team at Niya don’t think that putting people in a camp is the right way to deal with that problem. At least 89.3 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes and many of them have digital skills. They’re hungry to work and most of them don’t want to leave their home. This is a huge opportunity in a global economy that is going increasingly online, digital, and remote – and that has critical resource gaps.
“So, our strategy has been: let’s start building a marketplace to change the narrative around refugee talents and uncover a huge untapped source of talent for the global economy. Through our platform, we give people access to the market and also the opportunity to reskill. Our partnership with Endava has enabled us not only to provide critical skills development opportunities to over 100 amazingly gifted individuals that have been severely disadvantaged by events outside of their control, but it has also enabled us to gather critical learnings from those beneficiaries, to feed and develop own Machine Learning model that can identify and remove barriers to opportunity. We love working with Endava’s amazing team and hope to see the relationship develop and evolve over the coming years. “
Hugh Chichester, Niya CEO
This year we had the opportunity to rejoice the graduation of the participants from the Ukraine Tech Scholarship Programme. Initiated as a response to the humanitarian crisis, the programme focused on supporting individuals affected by the conflict, by providing them with free access to relevant learning resources across Software Development, Web Development, Data Analysis and Visualization, and AI & ML, as well as mentoring and guidance.
We also continued to build on our collaboration by supporting a new training programme, the Niya Tech Champions, addressing the wider spectrum of Social Mobility. The project provided scholarships for skilled people from a disadvantaged background, enabling them to develop new, meaningful skills that will help start a career in the tech sector.