Ten thou­sand (10,000) peo­ple would be trained in dig­i­tal lit­er­a­cy start­ing in Sep­tem­ber.

This was an­nounced by Tho­ra Best, the Chair­man of YTEPP Lim­it­ed when YTEPP signed a Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing (MOU) with the Min­istry of Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion (MDT) on Mon­day.

Best said 1,000 cit­i­zens would be tar­get­ed for the first cy­cle.

She ex­plained each cy­cle lasts for four weeks and would be con­duct­ed at YTEPP’s cen­tres at Mal­oney, Fifth Com­pa­ny Moru­ga, To­ba­go, Va­len­cia and Diego Mar­tin in the first in­stance un­til the MDT es­tab­lish­es its cen­tres.

Best said the train­ing would be done in dig­i­tal skills and life skills so na­tion­als would bet­ter be able to ac­cess all on­line goods and ser­vices, es­pe­cial­ly Gov­ern­ment ser­vices.

She added the on­set of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic forced every­one to start op­er­at­ing in a dig­i­tal world and caused many train­ing in­sti­tu­tions to re­think their method of de­liv­ery. She said YTEPP start­ed of­fer­ing an on­line blend­ed ap­proach to train­ing in 2016.

Richard Madray, the Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary in the Min­istry of Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion said the min­istry has sev­er­al projects in the near fu­ture to fa­cil­i­tate cash­less pay­ments, dig­i­tal iden­ti­ty, im­proved ease of do­ing busi­ness and the cre­ation of soft­ware.

Wayne Nakhid, Deputy Na­tion­al Chief, Dig­i­tal Of­fi­cer MDT, said the min­istry is part­ner­ing with the Min­istry of Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment to put 100 ac­cess cen­tres in place for train­ing by next year.

Nakhid said the ICT sec­tor can con­tribute 6. 4 per cent to the Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct (GDP) by next year as T&T seeks to di­ver­si­fy its econ­o­my away from pe­tro­le­um.