Innovative Programs

World Links is an innovative, award-winning, and independent not-for-profit enterprise, spun off from the World Bank, which leverages the unique potential of technology to bring opportunity and hope to disadvantaged youth around the world. A recognized leader in preparing students in developing countries and their teachers with 21st Century skills, World Links uses information and communications technology (ICT) and new approaches to learning to build skills and expand horizons. World Links’ training, combined with access to computers and the internet, results in the skills, knowledge, attitude change, and insight necessary for youth to participate and compete in global and local economies, while playing an important role in helping to eradicate poverty. 

World Links’ innovative programs provide developing countries with capacity building and self-sustaining, school-based, ICT solutions that transfer skills and create measurable, exponential impact:

• Transferring skills and building in-country capacity: World Links’ "train-the-trainer" approach to professional development transfers skills, ensures cost-effective scalability, and creates a system that produces exponential results. In each country where the World Links program is implemented, staff localize content and prepare "Master Trainers" to deliver the World Links professional development program to teachers, who then use their newly acquired skills and teaching methods to educate their students. This approach creates a process in which each stage affects a greater number of individuals than the previous stage. Moreover, World Links provides training programs that develop capacity and build local support for increased access to technology among government policy-makers, NGOs, and local communities interested in launching educational technology initiatives.
• Creating sustainability: World Links is a pioneer in the conversion of school computer labs into business-oriented community learning centers (telecenters). World Links developed an innovative program to provide school administrators and teachers with training in the management of self-sustaining telecenters. These dual-use telecenters generate a recurrent stream of revenue to ensure the sustainability of school computer labs long after direct-funding support has ended. The telecenter model enables the use of school computer facilities by teachers and students during school hours and by community members/associations during non-school hours. For more details on telecenters, please visit: www.world-links.org/content/category/10/23/50/ or our website: www.world-links.org under Telecenters.
• Generating exponential impact: Together, the implementation of school-based telecenters (see "Creating sustainability" above) and the cascading effect of our professional development program (see "Transferring skills…" above) enable World Links to exponentially impact students, out-of school youth, and members of the communities surrounding partner schools.
• Producing proven results: A 2006 World Bank-funded impact assessment of World Links’ activities in ten countries found that alumni of the World Links program earn salaries that are higher than average in their respective countries; that enrollment in higher education is significantly greater among alumni in most of the countries studied, that participation in the World Links program results in improved school attendance and that 60% of out-of-school youth who use our telecenters are girls. For more details and to download a copy of the entire impact assessment report, please go to: http://www.world-links.org/content/view/12/

World Links’ proven methodologies can also be used beyond the traditional classroom to provide:

• HIV/AIDS, health, drugs-awareness, environmental and hygiene-related education
• Vocational and professional training