Local employers specifically look to hire youth who have participated in CI’s programs, demonstrating the growing need for local offices to be able to talk about and run their youth employability programs on a CI-coordinated website. However, due to the nature of working with minors, not only do these websites need to meet general internet regulations in their respective countries, they must have sufficient cybersecurity to protect children’s information. As these requirements become more complex, it becomes a necessity to have local staff running the website. 

Both local and international CI staff have attempted to centralize and coordinate the websites over the years, but the complexity and volume of work to be done led to it not being completed. Now, CI wants to consult with all the local offices and leadership, define the requirements and goals for each, and prioritize them into a feasible workload for phase 1 of this project, with the end goal of empowering the local CI offices to promote and implement their youth employability programs.

Having both international and in-country teams presents many challenges, especially around communication; having similar messaging but different audiences, purposes, and ownership can lead to misunderstanding and a lack of information and digital presence. Given the wide-reaching nature of Children International (CI)’s work, they had endeavored to empower local country offices to manage their own websites back in 2015; unfortunately, due to competing priorities among other reasons, in-country CI websites have become defunct or failed to follow the evolution of the main CI website, leading to inconsistency in terms of brand, information, and security.