Desire Sackitey from Ghana serves as the Program Officer of the Africa Digital Leaders Program, a youth initiative under the Child Online Africa Foundation. The Child Online Africa Foundation is a youth-led organization that advocates for child online safety across the continent. Building on this mission, the Africa Digital Leaders Program focuses on empowering young people with digital safety knowledge, digital literacy, and entrepreneurial skills to ensure responsible, ethical use of technology.

The programme’s core activities include providing training in Scratch programming, coding mentorship, app development projects, and entrepreneurship capacity-building. Its core principles are digital literacy and digital inclusion. To bridge the digital divide, the programme specifically targets remote areas with little or no internet access, linking young people to digital connectivity and equipping them with relevant practical knowledge.

Desire Sackitey hopes that the future of global sustainable development will be shaped by digital inclusion and digital empowerment. He believes that young people, especially those in underserved communities, must be granted equitable access to digital resources, skills, and opportunities to ensure no one is left behind in the digital age.

Africa Digital Leaders

This program aims to teach creative and responsible digital skills to young African leaders aged 8 to 16. It intends to bridge the digital literacy gap among African youth, promote leadership development, guide them to use technology safely and responsibly, meet the demand for sustainable digital education in Africa, and cultivate the next-generation African leaders ready for the digital age.

The program has carried out a wide variety of activities,such as interactive sessions like “Face-to-Face with Thought Leaders”, masterclasses, and mentoring programs. The program collaborates with the UNESCO Office in Ghana and implements relevant projects with the support of Prada. It has started to develop a digital learning platform to provide interactive resources. The girls' education program under this initiative has provided Scratch programming training to 300 female students in some areas of Ghana, and at the same time, it has offered awareness-raising training for teachers and community leaders. The digital learning platform is also under development.

The programming and digital literacy of the program participants have been enhanced, their interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers has increased, more girls are able to continue their studies, and their cyber security awareness has been strengthened, laying a solid foundation for digital education and leadership development in Africa.

This project has been selected for the Action Plan for Global Youth Development.