Digital easy desk

Basic digital skills

Italy's Recovery and Resilience Plan aims to reduce the share of current population at risk of digital exclusion by launching the ‘Digital civil service’ initiative, a network of young volunteers of different backgrounds across Italy to provide individuals at risk of digital exclusion with facilitation and education services for the development and improvement of digital skills (Investment 1.7.1) and by strengthening the existing network of ‘Digital facilitation centers’ (Investment 1.7.2).

Digital facilitation centers are physical access points, usually located in libraries, schools, and social centers, which provide citizens with both in-person and online training regarding digital skills in order to effectively support their digital inclusion.

The initiative capitalizes on existing successful experiences and aims at ensuring a widespread development of such centers at national level.

While 600 centers are already active, their presence shall be further strengthened through dedicated training activities and new equipment, with the overarching goal to establish 2,400 new access points across Italy and to train over 2 000 000 citizens at risk of digital exclusion.

Out of 3 000 centers, at least 1 200 will be concentrated in the South of Italy.

The ‘Digital civil service’ initiative is divided into three years and incrementally, it is intended to achieve the following results: (i) realization of three annual calls for digital civil service projects aimed at non-profit organizations registered in the national register of universal civil service organizations; (ii) capacity building of the non-profit organizations participating in the annual call for the digital civil service and launch of digital facilitation and digital education projects; (iii) training and field experience in digital civil service projects of at least 8 300 volunteers; provision of 700 000 digital facilitation and/or digital education initiatives involving citizens developed by the digital civil service projects in which 8 300 volunteers will work.