By Aneesh Chatterjee
Learning to code; Nigeria. Photo: Desola Lanre-Ologun/Unsplash
In October, 2023, Microsoft partnered with M-PESA Africa in Nairobi to strengthen their efforts in digitizing small and medium-sized enterprises in various markets, and introducing businesses to digital skills training programs on the Microsoft Community Platform. Helping businesses become more comfortable with modern technologies and learning to use them may be the key to building resilience in rapidly transforming economies, and ensuring longevity and adaptability for enterprises of any scale. By partnering with local NGOs in targeted communities, Microsoft’s digital upskilling programs can be modified for a variety of local contexts, requirements, and problems – something that generative AI is becoming increasingly useful for.
Capacity-building for nonprofits across the world is a cornerstone priority for Microsoft, especially when it comes to closing the digital skills gap and allowing people and organizations the freedom, capabilities, and boosted efficiency brought on by emerging technologies. Their digital skills initiative came into full force at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, building the groundwork for long-term resilience in the wake of record unemployment rates across the world.
Today, Microsoft continues to engage with communities at the ground level through partnerships, provide access to powerful AI tools, and bolster the digital capacities of organizations at the front lines.
Global Washington spoke with Naria Santa Lucia, General Manager of Digital Inclusion at Microsoft Philanthropies, to learn more about their digital skilling enterprise.
Can you please introduce yourself and tell us about your role at Microsoft?
Sure, thanks! It’s great to be here. I really appreciate the invitation. I lead our Digital Inclusion work within Microsoft Philanthropies. That includes looking after our skilling work, how we engage with nonprofits and other international organizations to drive skilling at scale – especially in the digital, and now increasingly prevalent generative AI space – for people who may be left behind. We make sure they have the training and skills they need to embrace technology.
More broadly speaking, we have a three-part charter at Microsoft Philanthropies. The first is to help nonprofit organizations leverage and embrace technology so they can do their work effectively as agents of change. The second is the work that my team leads – the skilling space. Finally, we have a lot of work in employee engagement and disaster response – how we can help Microsoft employees give out their time, talent, and treasure to really make a difference.
Could you elaborate on employee engagement at Microsoft, particularly around digital scaling?
Absolutely. Employee engagement has been a core part of Microsoft’s DNA right from the beginning. We’ve set up different programs to ensure that people can give – and the company matches donations up to a certain amount. We’ve recently expanded that internationally to markets where it’s legally permissible, which has been very, very exciting. The giving of your dollar is really important to nonprofits. We really encourage every nonprofit to make sure they’re on our platform so they can be recipients of the generosity of our employees.
In addition to that, we really focus on helping people use their skills to volunteer. Two things in that area: we have a new program called Change Agents, which I think is very exciting. Essentially, it’s to help Microsoft employees who are getting involved with nonprofits. Whether it’s a board member or a volunteer, we arm all of our employees who want to be a Change Agent with information on how they can get free Microsoft technology products, skilling offers, how they can be a part of the Give Campaign – we’re almost like a concierge to a nonprofit. And then, obviously, the volunteering aspect is great. I’m a lawyer by training. So if there’s a way I want to get involved with a nonprofit to give legal aid advice, for example, I can get those hours matched with a donation to a nonprofit.
How do you define “digital inclusion” and why is this so important?
That’s a great question. Our mission at Microsoft is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. There is, of course, a business model that will drive enterprise customers to pay and access all these technologies. But to truly bring that mission to life, we need to think about extending to everyone the chance to be empowered. That’s where, I think, Philanthropies as an organization itself sits. We really try to extend Microsoft to every single community, especially those that may be at the margins or at risk of being left behind.
Digital inclusion in general can mean a lot of things – in the global context, you hear it a lot in the case of connectivity, skilling or capacity-building. In our team, we focus on the skilling aspect, but across Microsoft, we have teams that focus on broadband access and connectivity to skilling through devices. Bringing all those together are the three legs of the stool to broader digital inclusion.
Secondary school computer lab, Chennai, India. Photo: Haseeb Modi/Unsplash
I understand that your team has grown quite a bit in the last few years.
What I like is that it’s an interesting mix. In addition to the programmatic aspects of skilling, bringing content, data insights, certifications, thought leadership and connections for our nonprofit partners, we also have our field team that executes on the ground. We have Microsoft employees that act as Area Leads to bring that work into communities. We also have a footprint within the United States called TechSpark, and they help us figure out how to go into places where you may not think Microsoft would have a huge presence, like Cheyenne, Wyoming or Green Bay, Wisconsin – but we’re really trying to stand arm-in-arm with the community and help to skill and build a tech ecosystem.
What is Microsoft’s vision for the future of work?
We have a lot going on in this space. I’d just like to step back for a moment – one of the things that my team does is to help skill nonprofit organizations. There was a period, I would say two years ago, where we would really focus on digital skilling, because every job in the future would require some digital acumen. I think that’s become very true, especially for nonprofits. The biggest deflationary action is technology – to be able to save time and be more productive. With pressures on fundraising and other aspects, we need to think about how nonprofits and other organizations can be more efficient with the resources they have.
With the advent of generative AI, we’re now thinking about a future where every job requires generative AI fluency, lots of opportunities, and potentially disruptions caused by this new AI economy. We’ve already started to focus on that, and it will definitely be a focus in the future. We’re thinking about it in a couple of different ways. The first are the users – everyday workers, frontline workers, knowledge workers at developmental organizations, particularly nonprofits. We expect significant amount of productivity gains if we can help users themselves leverage generative AI.
Secondly, we’re thinking about developers. To have this AI economy, you need to have people who can continually build and develop language models in an equitable and unbiased way, and people who can develop tools and technologies using those models. For example, if you’re going to be in a country in the global south, you need data centers, you need electricity, but you also need developers and IT professionals who can build new tools and solutions.
Finally, we’ve been thinking a lot about how to help organizations embrace and adopt technologies responsibly. I don’t think we have done a lot on that in the past, because we focused more on introducing people to technologies and the skills they need. Not only do we need to teach people these skills and teach developers to build them, but organizations need to know how to embrace this. Organizations, right now, are grappling with what workloads can be made more productive with AI, what change management practices should be made, how they can do this responsibly and have good AI policy. Large enterprises, for-profit groups, will have lots of people on hand to advise and consult on that work – but I think there’s a huge opportunity for us to help nonprofits, especially the smaller to medium-sized ones, that may not have the ability to access that knowledge or guidance. Is there a way for Microsoft to help, and also involve the pro bono community as well?
Image created with openart.ai. Prompt: “painting of middle-aged African women on a farm looking at cellphones”
There’s a quote from the head of the Geneva Graduate Institute at Davos, two years ago I think, that said “AI won’t take your jobs. Somebody using AI will take your job.” Similarly for organizations, the ones that are able to be more productive, leverage technologies and do things more efficiently are the ones that will survive.
Nonprofits have a risk of being slow adopters. Also, we really need to push philanthropists and government funders to go and help nonprofits do this. Often, we’re pushing for programmatic project-based funding, but we don’t do enough to build the technological backbone. We don’t want nonprofits to miss the mark, because they are the front line, they know what communities need, they are the trusted groups.
Do you ever encounter suspicion of AI when you’re implementing it, where people are concerned with data security or government surveillance, for example?
We definitely do hear that. I think people should always approach things with that healthy skepticism. That’s why it’s really important that people have a sense of fluency in where data is going, what questions to ask, and what information is being provided. It’s important for us to educate people correctly. All of us need to be very aware of how we use these tools. People also need to understand that AI tools will have bias in them based on the available data that it’s trained on. In the global south, we often hear that people are worried about AI tools not being available in their native language, leading to them feeling excluded. As companies like Microsoft create these technologies, we need to understand how to use it responsibly.
I know that Microsoft calls their tool Copilot, and it really is a copilot in that respect – it isn’t going to take over the world.
I had a conversation with a friend of mine, who’s a teacher. She said she could tell immediately when a student had used Copilot or GhatGPT. We should never think of these as having perfect human qualities – these are tools like any other. It is a copilot – it’s a great first draft. When I first started practicing law, nobody ever wrote an original briefing. You always went into the briefing bank and built from there. That’s how I use AI – I’d ask it to write me a memo, for example, which I would then go in and edit. It saves a lot of time, and definitely gets you over that initial hump.
You touched on this a little bit, but can you talk more about specific programs where AI is empowering international learners?
I do really think that, as we are rolling out our new focus on generative AI, we’re going to build on the success of our previous programs and digital skilling, but where I’m most excited is learning how to use AI itself to upskill at scale. We’re going to train people on AI, but also use AI to do it.
We partnered with an organization called Data.org, and as their name implies, they’re a nonprofit that helps other nonprofits build up their data, AI, and machine learning capabilities. You and I were talking earlier about an organization in India, for example, which has troves of information written by hand. Data.org would help organizations like that to capture and leverage their data for additional programmatic outputs.
With Data.org, we launched a challenge: how can nonprofits use AI to skill and scale? There was an organization in India, for example, helping women, that had helped build a learning agent – a chatbot, essentially – that helped people train. We have a ton of content, but localizing that content is expensive and challenging. That’s one area where I’m really seeing generative AI help, at super-low costs. We can take our content in English, convert it to Swahili very quickly, and also add some local context to it for learners.
Young people, especially in the global south, are going to be the majority population. It’s an amazing opportunity to not only help them use generative AI in all fields, but train future developers. People who not only know the basics of computer science, but can use GitHub Copilot to code in natural language. Very excited about those opportunities.
What are some programs that you feel best represent the digital upskilling in international settings?
There’s one in Brazil that really illustrates how we do our work. We partner with a nonprofit organization that partners with the government of Brazil. It’s called the School of Workers. We just surpassed one million people trained on that platform. What I love about it is that it crossed administrations, because often, you’ll have uncooperative political parties. Bolsonaro had launched it with us, and Lula then took on the School of Workers, expanding and growing it. That’s a great testament to the power of us coming together with trusted nonprofits who partner with governments.
Another example that’s really indicative of how powerful generative AI can be is a group in India called Seeds, an organization that leverages AI to mitigate potential disasters. We’ve partnered with them to use our satellite imaging to map out, for example, a part in Delhi where you can tell by their roofing equipment in certain dwellings how much at-risk they are for heat waves. Then, Seeds would send out community workers on the ground, based on the data that we helped generate, to change the materials on those roofs.
How does Microsoft approach communities with programming where the resources, needs and jobs vary? Higher-income communities, for example, recognize digital skills as crucial and include that in their curriculum. Lower and middle-income countries are more concerned with building schools and getting people into classrooms first, for basic education. How does Microsoft engage those communities?
We would definitely always do things in partnerships. We do have content and resources for very basic digital skills, such as turning on a computer, all the way up to developing AI and everything in-between. There’s a great example where IOM – the UN organization for migration – visited a refugee settlement camp. It’s a tough place to be, and it would be ridiculous for Microsoft to come and say “we’ll teach you digital skills” when there’s no electricity. We know we can’t be everywhere in that capacity, but what we can do is help IOM itself, lower the cost of their operations, allow them more resources, space and time to actually go do their work in the field. We’re not going to be able to solve everything, but we can certainly build the capacities of organizations who are doing that work.
Secondly, on the skilling side, there are some people that my programs and my team can never help – and that’s okay. We need to understand where we can be most useful. We partnered with World Bank, for example, and gave them access to our digital content. They picked and chose what worked for them and have now started skilling people in Ethiopia.
Teenagers in Ghana learning computers. Photo CC by 2.0
We have a number of direct-to-learner offerings too. We have a number of free courses on LinkedIn available, including on generative AI, that result in a career essentials certificate. If you want to come and learn about Microsoft technologies, or how to be a software developer, we do have that free content. We just joined this group that helps skill women in Afghanistan. We are never going to be able to go directly to Afghanistan, but if we put this content out there and work through nonprofits to target specific people, they can go online to get the skills they need.
With everything that’s going on in the world – policies, politics, natural disasters, climate change – is there anything that’s really worrying Microsoft regarding these digital upskilling programs?
I would say, doing it as fast as we can, with as much scale as we can. I’d say that’s what keeps me up at night. It goes back to that theme where the inevitable is going to happen – every job is going to require AI fluency – and we don’t want to see another digital divide exacerbating the haves and have-nots. We’re thinking very much about how to do this at scale, just in time, so that people have access to the knowledge and content and learn the ability to leverage the technology.
What are you most hopeful for?
I definitely feel really hopeful for our kids these days, across the global south as well. The entrepreneurial nature – I feel like their energy is really different. They don’t have the same fears of earlier generations, they’re skeptical, which is what we need with the advent of these technologies. I also feel like they’ve been through so much. COVID, and the impacts of climate change. They’re super resilient. I do feel very excited in thinking about how the global development community can rally to help young people.
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In April, 2024, Microsoft announced a new chapter in their digital capacity-building initiatives: their commitment to the ASEAN Digital Masterplan 2025. By closing the gap in cybersecurity and AI skills, the project aims to bring technological fluency, skills training and long-term economic resilience to workforces across Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia – learning opportunities made available for up to 2.5 million people.