Reducing digital vulnerability

Founded in 2002, the e-Governance Academy is a centre of excellence: a joint initiative of the Government of Estonia, Open Society Institute and the United Nations Development Programme. eGA assists public sector and civil society organisations in making digital transformation happen.

The project DRIVE: Digital Research and Impact for Vulnerable E-citizens was designed to improve public authorities’ and civil society organisations’ (CSO) skills to to engage vulnerable groups in Ukraine and Georgia for preventing and overcoming the digital divide. Within this context Brand Manual helped train CSOs and public authorities through our service design masterclass format, to help them develop resilient and end user focused interventions, that target specific vulnerable groups.

While the sessions took place in a classroom format for two groups over four days in Georgia, the training for Ukrainian CSOs was necessarily conducted online over several weeks, due to the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine. The training focused on providing basic foundational design thinking and service design skills that allowed teams to design and co-create their solutions taking considerations the real challenges faced by their end-beneficiaries.

Feedback to the training was universally positive to the point of being referred to as “epic”. As both countries are facing increasing online misinformation campaigns by Russia and several of the projects had the stated aims of helping to combat misinformation by improving digital literacy among vulnerable groups, we sincerely hope that the results are also epic.