A decade ago, digital upskilling rarely reached the elderly, especially outside major cities, and few had opportunities to build their confidence by using online tools or navigating digital public services. For over 10 years UNDP has been supporting the Government of Serbia to redraw what digital fluency means and who it belongs to. The result of this work is now reaching pensioners, schoolchildren in small municipalities, lavender farmers in rural villages, mid-career professionals starting over in the IT sector, and civil servants who never expected to find themselves debating the merits of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) at work. The principle is simple: digital skills must reach everyone, so that no one is left behind in the country's digital transformation.

When Serbia named digital transformation and education as national priorities in 2017, the challenge came down not only to infrastructure but, even more importantly, to skills. The country’s IT sector was lacking more than 15,000 skilled workers. Public services were moving online faster than people could keep up. Teachers were being asked to prepare children for a future they themselves had not been trained for. UNDP Serbia worked with the government to address these gaps in a single connected effort. This meant linking school curricula, adult training programmes, community outreach, and public sector capacity-building under a shared digital inclusion agenda.

Digital-related subjects became compulsory in Serbian primary and secondary education in 2017. This meant that some of the earliest groundwork took place in Serbia’s classrooms. UNDP and the Petlja Foundation, which promotes digital literacy, partnered with the Ministry of Education to turn a curricular obligation into a teachable programme. They designed materials for every grade, trained teachers across the country, and uploaded tools to a free online portal. The Petlja platform now supports computer programming classes in 90 percent of Serbian primary schools. This also means that a child can receive an education in programming regardless of where they live or whether their school has specialist resources. To date, the curriculum has reached over 200,000 users, many of them teachers, who bring these materials into the classrooms and boost usage well beyond this number.¹

For Marko, one of the students who passed through Petlja’s seasonal programming camps, this became something more than a curriculum. “The best feeling is when you can say – this is something I made. This is my code, my project, and I stand behind it,” he says. His mentor Dimitrije, an electrical engineering student, found that teaching helped him advance as much as the students: “I learn alongside them, because through their projects I realize how much I know – and where I still need to grow.”