Is Your organisation ready for the next “pandemic”?

It is no understatement that the year 2020 changed the way we live our lives, but mostly how we do business and carry out work. The most important lesson from 2020 was being able to embrace change and build resilience on several fronts but essentially digital resilience.

Lots of organisations shifted their operations online and only those entities with the necessary digital skills remained afloat, otherwise many organisations sunk deep and may never see the light of day. A reminder that investing in the use and adoption of digital tools is no luxury but a necessity for any organization.

The big question: Is your organization digitally ready for the next “pandemic”? And do you individually have the right digital capabilities to continue being functional at your work during an incident like the Coronavirus outbreak?

Strengthening Human Rights in the Digital Age

On the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, the Digital Human Rights Lab together with Pollicy kickstarted an initiative to equip and support human rights defenders with the ever vital digital skills. Our mandate as the Digital Human Rights Lab is to provide a space, in which human rights defenders have the resources necessary to strengthen the promotion of human rights in a digitalised world.

Thus this initiative was to enable these crucial players to stay resilient to the situation in the long run as well as be able to adapt to the changing landscape of work. This came after the realisation that many human rights defenders and organisations were struggling to adjust to the new working modes that involved remote working and the use of various digital tools.

Through this collaborative initiative, lots of activities including WhatsApp workshops, webinars, and online hands-on tutorials were organised reaching over 1500 individuals across the globe. These training sessions tackled a wide range of topics including; Digital Data Collection, Digital Security, Data Visualisation, Remote Working Tools and Methods, Digital Visual Communication, Digital Organizing and Activism, Fake news, Misinformation, and Disinformation, Tracking, and Understanding Social Media Data.

Resources for Human Rights Defenders

Because we believe in designing for scale, we have made all the resources from those sessions available for reuse.

<<Find the Resources HERE>>

Beyond crises like the Corona-virus pandemic, it is important for each entity to build and boost its digital capabilities. This means equipping your staff with the right digital skills as well the organisation at large if you are to thrive in today’s world where technology is developed and deployed at a hyperspeed.

Building digital capabilities at the individual level boosts your ICT proficiency, information and media literacy, problem solving and innovation, digital communication, collaboration and partnership, digital learning, and development.

At the organisational level, building digital capabilities strengthens your digital culture, fastens content creation and communication, boosts research and innovation, and aids learning, teaching, and assessment.