The capability we work toward: learning and skills that open up wider choices.
Approved activities: supplementary classes for students at different educational stages, training courses, and cultural and scientific libraries.
Program development directions: computer and digital skills, and English language learning.
Why Education and Digital Skills Matter to Our Work
Education is one of the most direct ways a person moves from a barrier to a capability. When someone cannot access learning, struggles at school, or lacks the skills that daily life and work now require, the choices open to them narrow. When they gain knowledge and skills, those choices widen. This is why Education & Digital Skills is one of the Foundation’s five areas of work.
Many of the skills people now need are digital. Using a computer has become part of studying, looking for work, communicating with others, and reaching information and services. A person without these skills can be left behind even when other doors are open to them. For this reason, we treat digital skills not as a specialist subject but as part of the basic capability a person needs to take a full part in learning, work and community life.
Our Experience: Computer Training for Blind and Sighted Participants
The Foundation has conducted training courses in computer use for people who are blind and for sighted people. The training focused on computer use and digital skills.
This experience is closely tied to who we are. Our name, Ebsar, means sight and perception: a person becoming able to see, understand and move forward where something once stood in their way. Offering computer training to blind participants as well as sighted participants reflects that meaning directly. The barrier each person starts from may differ, but the capability we work toward is the same: being able to use a computer and the digital skills that come with it.
This previous work gives the Foundation practical experience to build on as it develops this area further, including in the program development direction set out above: computer and digital skills.
What Digital Skills Make Possible
We value digital skills for what they allow a person to do, not only for the skills themselves.
Learning. Being able to use a computer widens access to learning, supports progress at school, and makes it possible to keep learning beyond the classroom.
Independence. Digital skills can allow a person to carry out more everyday tasks for themselves, rather than relying on others to do them. For people with disabilities, including blind people, this can be an important step toward greater independence.
Access to information. Much of the information people need about education, health, work and public services is now found online. Digital skills help people reach it directly.
Communication. Computers are now a common way to stay in contact with family, teachers, employers and the wider community.
Opportunity. Computer skills are increasingly expected in work and further study. Building them can help open doors that would otherwise stay closed, which connects this area closely to our work on economic opportunity.
Inclusive Learning for People of Different Abilities
People come to learning with different abilities, different starting points and different needs. Learning that assumes everyone takes in information in the same way can leave some people out entirely. A computer course designed only around what can be seen on a screen, for example, would exclude a blind learner before the first lesson began.
Inclusion is one of the Foundation’s core values. We work so that people with disabilities and those with fewer opportunities have a full place in education, work and community life, and when designing any activity we take care to make it accessible to all, without discrimination. Our experience of providing computer training to both blind and sighted participants reflects this commitment in practice. It also links this area closely to our work on Disability Inclusion, where learning is one of the capabilities we work toward.
From Barriers to Capabilities
The Foundation’s approach rests on a single question: what is stopping this person from moving forward, and how can we help remove it? In education, the barrier may be limited access to learning, difficulty at school, or a gap in the skills a digital age demands. For a blind person, it may also be the assumption that computers are not for them.
We measure success by what a person has become able to do, not only by what they have received. In this area, that means a person who can now learn, find information, communicate and pursue opportunities that were previously out of reach. Education and digital skills are, in this sense, among the clearest examples of what we mean by moving from barriers to capabilities.