President Dr Arif Alvi on Thursday urged the country’s youth and women to actively enroll and benefit from the 15,000 online courses offered under Google’s Career Certificate Programme. The president said this in his virtual address to the launching ceremony of the Google Career Certificate Programme, under which Google was offering high-end online courses like IT support, automation, project management, UX design, data analytics, digital marketing & e-commerce etc., in Pakistan. The progamme was launched in collaboration with the Institute of Rural Management (IRM) and IGNITE. President Alvi said the initiative would bring vibrancy among the Pakistani youth and women to help increase their participation in the economy, including improving the digital economy. He added that enhanced digitalization would increase the inclusion of women in the economy, besides enabling them and the youth to market their services throughout the world using ICT (information communication technology) tools. He further said digitalization would increase the efficiency of businesses and accelerate their processes, along side giving opportunities to the unemployed people to contribute to the economy. The president said Pakistan could take the biggest jump, not in the brick-and-mortar world, but through the help of the IT sector as the number of people required in that field would increase in future as the amount of data that needed processing was also increasing day by day. He said Pakistan needed such kind of training courses as it possessed a youth bulge and some of the students, who did not have access to higher education, would be able to participate in the economy by acquiring the latest digital and IT skills. President Alvi appreciated that Google, by offering 15,000 courses, was playing a part in Pakistan’s transformation towards the digital technology. He called upon the students to benefit from such programmes, especially the digiskills programme of the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication, wherein 2.5 million people had been trained. He added that the digiskills programme had been a success as it enabled the previous unemployed youth to earn gainful jobs.