A lack of basic digital skills is one of the key barriers to internet adoption across the world. In order to rectify this, the GSMA’s Connected Society team developed the Mobile Internet Skills Training Toolkit (MISTT), a set of resources for organisations (including MNOs) interested in conveying the fundamentals via the most commonly used internet services (WhatsApp, Facebook, Google, YouTube and Wikipedia).

A pilot study of the toolkit was conducted in Sub Saharan Africa, by the mobile network operator Tigo Rwanda. This resulted in over 300 sales agents being trained to use the MISTT, who in turn trained over 250,000 data paying customers. Overall, Tigo Rwanda witnessed substantial benefits, with 77% of MISTT trained customers increasing their data usage in the period after their sales agents introduced the training. Furthermore, MISTT trained sales agents managed to increase the number of new data subscribers by 15%. This lead to a 240% increase in quarterly return on investment.

Find out more by downloading the MISTT here.