For us, obviously, education, vocational training and employment are key factors for the safe and successful reintegration of offenders.
I just want to share with you that, of the offenders who have an identified need for an upgrade to their education, when we look at 2017-2018 and up to now, the percentage has actually been increasing. It's the same for the offenders with an identified need for vocational training. Our percentages have been increasing.
The other good thing is that when we look at the results related to an upgrade in education prior to the end of the sentence for indigenous offenders, that also has been increasing. For indigenous offenders it's actually 74%, compared to 65% for non-indigenous offenders. This is certainly an increase. The same applies to women. There's been an increase from 64.7% to 80%.
I heard what the OCI had to say. Definitely we offer a number of kinds of vocational training, with third party certification. I do want to stress that in 2019-20, it was probably the most we've offered. Almost 18,000 certifications were earned by male offenders, of which 5,000 were for indigenous men. There were 2,500 for women, of which 1,000 were for indigenous women.
Our vocational certifications cover a significant breadth of types of employment. There are certifications for safety, construction, horticulture and manufacturing. Definitely CORCAN is working very hard to expand the breadth of services we can offer.
There's another thing we're looking at and are quite excited about. We discussed it at our executive committee just two weeks ago. It's to establish a virtual approach to deliver critical CSC correctional programs digitally. Certainly COVID-19 has shown us that we need to move more into digital services. Definitely CSC has its challenges, but this is where we're moving to.
We're also ready to launch a digital education pilot at one of our Ontario institutions. I will admit that it's been in the works for quite some time, but now it's going to be launched. I'm looking forward to the results, because this is something we're going to be looking at expanding.