Google and the ITU open 100,000 AI skills scholarships

Google and the International Telecommunication Union will fund 100,000 certificate scholarships on artificial-intelligence and digital-skills courses, spread across more than 80 countries. The announcement, published on Google’s blog on 22 September and by-lined by Lisa Gevelber, the founder of Grow with Google, and Doreen Bogdan-Martin, the ITU’s secretary-general, places the training inside the AI Skills Coalition, a partner-led programme under the ITU’s AI for Good work.

Why the ITU thinks this is urgent

The ITU’s own estimate is the part worth holding on to: 1.2 billion people still need training to reach basic digital skills, and a further 311 million need training beyond that level. Google adds a finding of its own, drawn from research it ran with Ipsos, that hands-on practice makes people up to four times more likely to become confident with AI tools. Put together, the argument is that connectivity without capability produces a dividing line rather than a ladder.

The announcement was timed to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where Google says the same question - how a beginner is supposed to start with AI - came up repeatedly. The company frames the gap as one that no single government or vendor can close alone, which is also a fair description of why a telecoms standards body is involved in an AI training programme.

How the scholarships actually work

The 100,000 places sit inside a catalogue of more than 200 courses already listed by the coalition, and Google says they will be delivered through local governments and the ITU-UNICEF Giga initiative, which exists to connect every school. National ministries and local leaders are given room to tailor the training to their own workforce priorities, and the stated audiences are students, teachers, job seekers, entrepreneurs, small business owners and civil servants.

Three things are promised with each place: practical exercises that assume no technical background, recognised certificates taught by named experts so a learner has something to show an employer, and programmes designed around a country’s own labour priorities rather than a single global syllabus. Google also says it will publish how the scheme is going, tracking scholarship activation and use, learner participation and completion, certificates earned and overall reach.

Who is behind it

The coalition is described as partner-led and gathers governments, industry, academia, United Nations organisations and civil society, with the ITU providing the convening role. Google’s contribution is the scholarships and its own course material, reachable from the Grow with Google site. The ITU’s part is the network: member states, ministries and the school-connectivity programme that decides where training can actually be delivered.

Our opinion

Certificate schemes are the easiest thing in technology policy to announce and the hardest to judge, because the number that gets published is the number of scholarships and the number that matters is the number of people who finish a course and then use it. Google has at least named the metrics it intends to publish - activation, participation, completion, certificates - which is more than most corporate skills pledges manage. The test is whether those figures appear in a year, disaggregated by country, without a public-relations cycle to carry them.

The ITU’s 1.2 billion figure also implies a limit that the announcement cannot solve. Training assumes a device, a connection and the hours to sit through a course, and those are precisely what the people at the bottom of that number lack. Funded places are welcome, and the Giga tie-in is the right instinct, but a scholarship is a voucher for people who already have somewhere to spend it. The honest measure of this programme is whether the 100,000 places reach learners outside the cities where the courses are easiest to run.