IGF 2023 Lightning Talk #174 Switch! - an inclusive approach to capacity building

On this lighting talk, we will be sharing about the experience of the APNIC Foundation work to tackle the lack of diversity in the Internet industry. Through an extensive consultation process, the Switch! project started about 3 years ago to identify women and gender diverse network engineers and cybersecurity professionals across 6 South East Asia economies. Part of the consultation supported the design of the project approach, tailored to the needs of the participants, and exploring strategies to build technical skills, operational capacity and confidence so that in turn, selected participants are willing -and able- to engage more actively with Internet development. Switch! has supported over 200 individuals from Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Timor Leste, The Philippines and Viet Nam to develop their own Professional Development Plans and commit to their learning journey. The participants are supported by a National Coordinator to identify the pathways that best suit their individual needs and encourage to pace their learning to achieve their goals, always looking at the opportunities to share their learning and be seeing as active and productive technical community members. The project funds technical training and certification across a wide variety of training and education providers, as well as providing coaching and complementary support around language proficiency, public speaking and management skills. Selected project participants have also receive support to further develop their research interests through small research grants for selected research topics, with a commitment to publish research outcomes and share with their technical community. Although most of the support is providing online, the project also supports travel and accommodation expenses to technical events and conferences that are aligned with their personal plans, and assist them to prepare their interventions and presentations. The project offers to the participants a simple online tool to track and report progress, that powers a dashboard that allows the project team to keep track of progress at country level as well as the overall project level. The project was initially funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAT) and Trade of the Australian Government and was later expanded with generous support from the Asia Pacific Internet Development Trust (APIDT).

The session will use at least one online poll to gather questions and comments from the audience. The session will have an onsite and online moderator addressing the comments and questions from the audience.