TRANSCRIPT: WCC India Speaker Series Webinar 2
Designing Creative Women-Centric Technology
May 27th, 2021
Description: To close the gender digital divide, programs must use technology options tailored to women in developing countries, many of whom are illiterate or have low literacy levels. Innovative video and audio platforms allow women to readily communicate and learn. Offline content on a range of development topics can reach women who do not otherwise have access to the internet. Custom devices and services can meet women’s needs much better than a “universal” technology.
WCC Steps to Success Series: Designing Creative Women-Centric Technology
Speaker:
Dr. Revi Sterling
Women Connect Challenge Director
[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT: 00:00:28]
Dr. Revi Sterling:
Hi and good morning everyone from DC and whatever time it is in your time zone. I’m so excited to have our fourth and final webinar series in our Steps to Success program that we’ve done, looking at some of the outcomes and findings from The Women Connect Challenge that also resonate with the larger set of recommendations and effective practices across the gender digital divide.
I’m very excited to see everybody come on in and make yourself at home for the next hour. It’s great to see so many people return to this series. We’ve had a few people, Sue B, Dr. Strong, Fatima, welcome back and I hope this has been a great series for you.
I’m super excited for today because it really gets to the heart of designing with women for women. It really gets to women’s unique information needs and how we address these. We talk about things like the digital development principles where the number one piece is designed with the end-user, and yet this is just not something that people know how to do well. It’s not going in and talking to the token woman that came to your focus group because she’s the chief’s wife or she has status in the community. We know that the women that take advantage of a lot of the digital literacy programs already have a lot of agency in their communities.
What the Women Connect Challenge has been all about is creating on-ramps and on-roads for women who are under-connected and unconnected. We talked about these things through the social norms piece that we did through the women building confidence series and all of these will soon be on the women connect website so if you’ve missed any of these it would be great to have you go back.
We have such cool speakers today I am so delighted I can barely handle it. Before we get into that, a little housekeeping and discussion about what we’ve done with The Women Connect Challenge and what we’ve found as a context for this. Let me talk briefly about this.
We absolutely know that there should be this great force multiplier between women and technology as these leading drivers in the change in communities, and yet we continue to create technology top-down, maybe with the input of a few people, but we know best about the challenges, applications, and all of these things that we push as part of digital strategies from donors, technologies, ministries, etc.
It’s just absolutely missing the mark when trying to reach women. They’re looking at these things and saying “I’m not gonna use that, I don’t trust that, I don’t have the skills, I don’t have the confidence or the time”. We all know this because otherwise, you wouldn’t be here on these recordings unless you feel the same pain that we do, but that pain is nothing compared to this digital gap that we keep growing by not building technologies that specifically address women’s information needs and meet women where they are.
Otherwise, are we really ever going to hit target 5B of the UN sustainable development goal, and I do hope we see that. We have seen some remarkable changes in the last few years, but going back to our first talk in the series four weeks ago, we had Sophia Higher talking about the same issues that she wrote the first paper in this space about in 1997.
The Women connect Challenge, now that we’re on our fourth round, really started off as our USAID’s effort to look at the social norms that underlie this gender digital divide. Yes we can slap band-aids on this and we have forever, like a computer training course or a subsidized phone or airtime, but none of those things are sustainable. They don’t have up-market support, they don’t have down-market support, and they don’t have community support.
What The Women Connect Challenge was really about is understanding the cultural context of the communities we are trying to engage with, and then creating appropriate, sustainable, and gender-equitable solutions that have full community support in the service of women’s empowerment.
Technology, in that case, has affected some of the social norms in creative ways, I look at some of the Aftrix projects we did, etc, but at the same time, we need to understand that there are these barriers and this fear of empowered women, and that manifests itself in the technology and how we deploy it.
Across the four Women Connect Challenges, we’ve had over a thousand proposals, we work in sixteen countries, and it has been really fabulous to work with organizations that hadn’t gotten USAID funding previously, because they’re the ones on the ground that really know what works, and then we can deliver that as addressing a customer base, not charity cases. I think that’s really important that we have a lot of dignity in the design of all of these projects.
Also, It helps reiterate and refocus what the priorities need to be when we’re trying to bring women online and keep them there. We have to look at the social norms, we have to change these cultural perceptions that the internet is immoral or a bad place to be for women. Creating economic opportunities as we talked about in webinar one, cultivating women’s confidence to even use the technology when you have women that say things like “I’m too dumb to use this” or “my phone is smarter than me” and hearing that again and again. My favorite one today is about designing and creating women-centric technology.
Our three speakers are just going to be fabulous. We're following the model of having a researcher talk about why this is so important and the state of the knowledge base in this area. Then we're going to have a Women Connect Challenge awardee talk about how they designed and codesigned with women and understanding their information needs. Then we’re finishing up with an academic-practitioner, in this case, Osama Mazan, who's going to talk about how to marry the research and practice into something that really can change the lives of women and close this gender digital divide.
Just a little map of where we’re currently working, it’s wonderful to see everyone from here.
Dr. Sterling references the map shown at [00:06:50]
We have Morocco, we have the rare city of Seattle and Zimbabwe. Thanks, everybody for coming, and if we don’t have a project in your country I'd love to just understand better what’s happening. If there is a project in your country and you need to be connected let me know. Tariqa is here, we’ve got Malaysian representation, this is wonderful.
I will at the end also come back to this slide to talk about some of the great USAID resources that are in this space. Everybody from the first-time person experiencing the gender digital divide and knowing that they have to close it but they don’t necessarily know what it is, to proven strategies, to a really interesting risk mitigation guide that’s in the desk review, so we have lots of things we can share with you.
As always I will put my email in the chat and I want to stay in touch with all of you. This is not a one-person or one donor show, we all have to be working together. I don’t know if anyone came from the BBC Media Action webinar right before this that had some amazing people on it like Sarah Chamberlin, and Alex tires. It also had Osama on it so he’s doing back-to-back webinars with us today.
I am going to be quiet and turn this over to the first speaker, Dr. Indrani. Dr. Indrani is one of my favorite people in the universe. When I was at Microsoft India, she was a huge draw. She’s such an inspiration, talking about someone that understands that exact intersection of ethnography and technology, and low-resourced communities. She is basically my idol in the space of interaction design for low-resource communities and low-literate people. I don’t even know how many awards and best papers she won because she’s such a powerhouse, but she’s also just so humble about what she’s doing even though she has completely advanced all of the research in this area.
She is still the principal researcher at the technology for emerging market groups at Microsoft Research, and she has single-handedly defined what computer interaction is in digital development. So Indrani, will you take it away?
Speaker:
Dr. Indrani Medhi Thies
Principal Researcher
Microsoft Research India
[00:09:15]
Dr. Indrani Medhi Thies:
Thank you so much, Revi for a very generous introduction and I’m very excited to be here today. I’m really honored to be here today. I've spent the past decade and a half doing human-centered design research for technologies in low-income, low-literate communities. Today I will talk about some of our research from over the years that have targeted or impacted women, and how our research has been taken forward and implemented, and lessons that have been learned about designing technologies for low-literate women.
My primary research at Microsoft research India has been in the design of user interfaces for low-literate users. So the question that we ask in this research is “how do we create user interfaces such that any person who is not literate, has never been to school, cannot interact with a mobile phone or PC, can extract information that is relevant to his or her life with minimal or no external assistance?”.
In terms of methodology, we conducted ethnographic interviews where we combined immersive observations and directed one-on-one interviews. We had a very participative design process where we’ve involved the end-user in the design process. We’ve started with fieldwork and tried getting an understanding of things. It's been a very iterative design process, and we started with an understanding from the field and we would bring the understanding back to the lab.
We would design prototypes for users and then take these prototypes back to the field to evaluate with our users, get their feedback, and roll that feedback into the next iteration. So over the past several years, I've spent hundreds of hours in the field across rural and urban locations in India, the Philippines, and South Africa.
So our first design application was the job information system for domestic helpers. Most domestic helpers in urban India are women who do cooking, cleaning jobs at other people's homes. Think of this application as a monster.com, but for the informal labor market, through which you can get cooking, cleaning jobs that are posted by potential employers.
Other applications that we've looked at over the years are information dissemination, map navigation, mobile money transfer, video search in agriculture videos, social networking for farmers, and so on. All right, so these are screenshots from some of the applications we designed.
Dr. Indrani references that screenshots shown at [00:13:10]
We use a combination of graphics, voice, video, and numbers in our UI as the low-literate women that we were working with were numerous. We had to pay attention to sucky graphical cues because people's understanding of the graphics was dependent on various, uh, psychological, cultural, or language biases that they had.
When we tested these interfaces, we saw that the women that people are working with required less assistance on our interface as compared to a standard TechSpace interface, but our interfaces were still not sufficient to allow women to proceed independently. All right, so we took a step back and we looked at the problem. One thing to keep in mind is that people who have low literacy have very little exposure to formal education. Many of these individuals have never been to school, and this is especially true for women. In many cases, girls in these communities, especially in rural areas, don't go to school for a variety of reasons. Maybe they have to help at home, they have to take care of a younger sibling, they may not have proper toilets for girls in the school, and the commute to the school is not considered safe.
Even if they did attend school, it was most likely in a very low-resource classroom. Like you see, on the slide where not every kid receives individual attention and falls far behind grade level. And while the lack of textual literacy is one of the most visible symptoms of lack of education. There are these other cognitive skills that can be attributed to performing education. And it turns out that any lack of these cognitive skills has a much bigger impact on people's approach to computers or user interfaces.
So as a next step, we had to, reaping the intervention, not just to remove texts, but really designed for the cognitive abilities and skills of the people that had never been to school.
We did a study to understand if, you know, speech interfaces could enable low literate women to easily look up information. And we saw that women use speech up much less. Instead of preferred touch input on the interfaces, it turns out that several of the women that we worked with were shy. They were not confident to speak up, even if they did speak up, they would not speak loudly because maybe the brother-in-law, the father-in-law was in the adjacent room, and as a result, the system would not recognize the voice well, and the interaction would break down.
So those are the kinds of social, cultural challenges that we had to work with. All right. So our design principles have been taken and executed by Novana Tech. So Novana Tech is a startup that's currently operating out of our lab at Microsoft Research in Bangalore. Novena has been building tax-free image-based voice-assisted technologies for low-literate users of smartphones.
They're currently developing applications for different organizations in financial inclusion, in a social networking platform for farmers, AI-powered, anthropometry, and child health. Currently, Novana has 500,000 active, monthly active users. We do not have data on active female users yet, but towards the end of this year, there is this banking application, which is going to be launched, which is expected to reach 800,000 women.
In general, we see that women from low-income communities are unable to participate in paid digital work, one future-facing project close to the center that we have at Microsoft is called Karya, where we explored paid crowdsourcing in low resource settings, where users are individuals in rural India who are relatively new to digital devices and literate mainly in local languages.
So we built an Android application to measure the accuracy with which participants can digitize handwritten, mariachi, and Hindi. In this case, the task is based on the real-world need for digitizing handwritten government documents. We saw that younger women in these communities showed overwhelming enthusiasm to complete tasks on the platform so much so that we had to recommend imposing limits to prevent overuse of the application because sometimes they will forgo lunch, not sleep at night, because they were so excited to do this digital work for which they were getting paid. And this is an example in which low-income women can do digital work from the comfort and safety of their homes.
So I would also like to mention this case study of Commcare by the social enterprise called Dimagi. So Commcare is a low-cost mobile phone data collection solution. We'll be working with a female community of health workers in rural central India. Most of these women had no previous experience using mobile phones before the project, and the Comcare data collection system required me to text input, which was quite complicated. Like you said, seeing the center of the screen.
We were surprised, you know, after months of deployment, when we went back to the field, we saw that women had taught themselves native text input, either through rote learning or you know, drawing phone T maps, for example, which alphabet maps to what key they would take the help of their spouses, they had rote learned the whole thing.
So the motivation was that they could hold on to the work phone that was given to them, later on in the evening to use the phone for personal use, for example, you know, calling their sisters and calling their family. So strong was the motivation of use for social connection and personal, a word that they taught themselves complicated native text input that was required at work in this data collection.
So in closing, I would say that in the case of women these literacy and digital literacy challenges are exacerbated. There are lots of issues with the access that women still do not have like phones, and in a lot of communities they do not have ones of their own, they might share the phones of their spouses or, you know, another male member of the household.
However, we also see the motivation of use that comes from wanting social connection. For example, wanting to talk to a family at the end of the day or livelihood generation, like you saw in the example of Karya, where younger women are doing crowdsourced paid work from the comfort of their home. And very often we see that strong motivation to use can help trump usability challenges. So with that, thank you so much.
Speaker:
Dr. Revi Sterling
Women Connect Challenge Director
[00:21:07]
Dr. Revi Sterling:
Awesome. Your work has done so much to inform the work that myself and my grad students do. I always call yours out as mandatory reading. I think especially when we're looking at COVID response and the fact that you have so many people in the informal sector that are illiterate or have low literacy and numeracy skills, you know, and we're trying to reach information to them, get information to them. This is so critical, especially now. It's not like, you know, a domestic worker can work from home during COVID.
So I think that this is a lifeline and also a practice that everybody should be using in their design. Thank you so much, you have so many great questions as well in the chat window. So we'll get back to those during Q and A but feel free to interact with people directly between now and then if you want to address some of their questions. I want to make this as interactive as possible, but, oh my gosh, thank you for spending your time with us this morning.
Next, I would like to talk and introduce Tara Hopkins, one of the co-directors of Mali Health, and Mali Health is an amazing organization. It's one of those organizations that is small and effective and nimble, and they're on the ground and they spend time, and they’re so trusted. And these are the kind of organizations where they're not tech organizations, you know, in this case, it's a health organization and it's so trusted.
It's very community-based. I mean, if you look at all the tenets of participatory action research, you wouldn't have a better org than Mali Health to show that in practice. Mali Health has been devoted to supporting, you know, women through local solutions for health care, for their economic empowerment, for family and community cohesion. And it was one of those cases where here's an org that, you know, as I said, isn't a tech hoard, but realize that technology might have an ability to scale and sustain information dissemination in a way that otherwise just can't be done.
And then, in this case, Mali Health is working with very low resource women, but who have lots of ideas. And I mean, they are just brilliant and driven in their ways. And I'm also just really grateful that Mali, as you know, a lot is going on in India where our other speakers focus on and it really underscores and makes us look at the role of ICT and the internet and empowering people for information in very trying times.
So, Tara, I'm going to turn it over to you. Also, I have a huge soft spot for Tara and Bamako because it was the first Women Connect Challenge site visit I got to do. I've been back a few times now and it was just such an amazing trip. I'm so grateful to you. I'll turn it over.
Speaker:
Tara Hopkins
Co-Director
Mali Health
[00:23:53]
Tara Hopkins:
Thank you, Revi, that's beyond generous and we're just so honored to be a part of The Women Connect Challenge and a part of this presentation. It's my honor to represent our entire team today.
I just wanted to start by underscoring the point that Revi made, which is that, you know, we are not a technology organization. We are a grassroots community health organization. So our journey and the Women Connect Challenge was something that we did not know how it would go, but it's one of the best experiences that we've had as a learning organization and as an organization that is really committed to identifying solutions that work for women and are designed and led by women.
I think we've done that through this partnership. So the initial idea that we came to The Women Connect Challenge with was actually for our financial inclusion program, which helps women access health information in small groups, and then save funds to access either preventative health products to access care at the health center when they need it.
So we learned about a voice-based technology that was actually developed in Mali and because of the community where we work. We work in primarily peri-urban communities in, in Bamako. We knew right away and saw the applications right away for a voice-based interface, and helping women that we serve to help them access health information. And as social behavior changes communication specialists, we have a team full of communication specialists. We saw the potential for technology that was adapted to their needs to really help us extend the reach of some of this really important health information.
In Mali, the literacy rate for women is only 28%. The communities we're serving, it's closer to 90, 95%, of lack of literacy and numeracy skills. We knew that there was a strong alignment there, and we had kind of the outline of how we could use this technology to extend our program reach and even scale it if you will. As we got into the project that really changed.
I just want to talk a little bit about our approach which again, you know, as, as a health organization, that's designing community-based interventions. Everything we do starts with assessing needs on the ground and, you know, working alongside women daily, not just to design programs, but to improve them to think about ways that we can alter them to make them more impactful and more effective. Where we started was trying to understand that relationship, existing relationships towards CT, and as communicators, we know the impact that technology can have.
Video is a really great way to reach the women that we're serving. The Internet and a smartphone were something that we really just had no idea how this could potentially work. So we started again with just a lot of listening and co-design work. Then we launched into certain social norms research, which was such a strong component of The Women Connect process and project. And one of the reasons that we were just so thrilled to work on this project was because The Women Connect Challenge emphasized understanding needs in the communities where we were implementing our projects.
So we were looking at working with 400 women in Sabala Buku, which is a peri-urban community in Bamako. About two-thirds of the women with whom we were working had some kind of primary school education or less included about a third of women who had no formal education at all, about one third had some secondary school education, and none of the women we were working with had completed their education. We asked a ton of questions about ICT use, internet use. We used a focus group, but also did a lot of work with the framing of questions and reframing questions to make sure we were really getting at all the possible ways that we could think about technology use and internet and phone use.
There are so many interesting things that we learned, but one of the things that I wanted to highlight was kind of our first big aha moment. And our first surprise was that as we were asking about, you know, why do women use technology, or why do they use the internet, or should they, or what are the problems that they can encounter? We met almost no resistance to the idea of women using ICT or using the internet. So we were kind of expecting some of those attitudes about, you know, morality, but we didn't encounter that.
It was part of the reason we thought about extending and expanding the project scope. Eventually, we did get there. But then as we looked at what is preventing women from accessing technology using the internet? There were just a variety of reasons, but a lot of the reasons were ascribed to the understanding level of education, which we suspected was not as much of a barrier or was a barrier that could be overcome. So that is really what we focused on.
Another really interesting finding was that in general, we would ask questions about TV being problematic for women to use and by and large men and women said, no, no big deal. Women can listen to the radio. Women can use their simple cell phones, they can watch TV, no problem.
But when we talked about the internet specifically, then it became, oh, yes, that, that is very problematic.
So for us, we were trying to understand, okay, what is exactly behind that? The conclusion that we came to is that the internet was not the familiar ICT technology in the communities that we serve. And once technology has become known and familiar, wide and broad acceptance and understanding would be something that we could achieve. So over the course of starting to meet with women in focus groups to talk about what technology would look like, we did the first round of user testing. We found that we did not have as much. So again, going back to our approach as public health practitioners, we felt like there was a lot more information than we needed to move forward with developing a technology.
And I really just have to credit Revi and the whole Women Connect Challenge team who just really encouraged us to say, great, go keep collecting the data, keep staying in conversation with the women that you're serving and collect that information that you need. And it was about that time that we had received some feedback from women, in the design, the sort of co-design stages that we wanted to pursue.
So just a little bit of context for our technology. Our app is a completely voice-based interface that allows women to download health messages on different topics. And then one of the features that we added was the ability to record a question for a doctor. So interaction with a doctor within this voice-based interface became one of the most popular features and really kind of a core function of our technology.
That came completely from the women that we serve. So after we got to that point after we developed that sort of additional piece that we did not foresee at the beginning of the project, we completed another round of user testing, and then we sent women home with phones. We did have to purchase some in the course of the project to really do that robust user testing to get the data that we really were interested in.
We really saw an interesting change over that time period of the second round of user testing, which was led entirely by our team and after women had been able to take their phones home and use the technology over a period of time. At first, the ability to ask a question of a doctor was very popular. Again, that idea came from them.
But over time it was the ability to access maternal and child health information topics. So malaria information, malnutrition information, just basic information that women would have received in their groups, but if they weren't in that group setting, and maybe they, you know, had a child who was becoming ill and really wanted to consult, okay, what are those symptoms of malaria? Or, you know, what do I do if I think my child has a case of diarrhea, what are the steps that I take? Having that information in their hand and the ability to access that when they needed it was transformative.
That really became the primary way that women are using technology. So just getting to our key findings, having information in the palm of their hand is what became the ultimate utility of this technology for the women that we serve.
One hundred percent of them said that having access to that information increased their use of their phone. We do see part of what is encouraging for us is that having access to information was really at the heart of some of the issues related to gender equality and some of the fear, or maybe mistrust of technology. Helping women have access to that information really just allowed those norms or fears or concerns to adjust.
I want to underscore that the level of education that women had and their literacy level absolutely had no impact on their ability to use the technology in either the short or the long term which was an interesting finding for our team as well. So I will just leave it there but I really look forward to answering any questions you may have and hearing from this wonderful colleague. Thank you again.
Speaker:
Dr. Revi Sterling
Women Connect Challenge Director
[00:35:42]
Dr. Revi Sterling:
Tara, it’s so great to see you. It's so fun to see those pictures, my heart goes out to everybody right now that's wondering what the future is right there, but I also know that you have so affected both the future of the women that you've worked with, you know and their families and their male counterparts who actually have been incredibly supportive of women.
I'm gonna ask Osama to join us. I feel like I'm so delinquent in not having known this amazing man who, when I look at his bio, I mean, he has done everything in journalism and software, in making sure that he's reached, you know, 20 million people with his programs to empower the masses through technology and ICT.
He's an artist as you'll see by the slides, but also a social entrepreneur. He helps AI and the state department figure out their digital development strategies and their equitable connectivity. I'm pretty blown away by the resume of this man that is Osama. And now, after working with him a little bit on some of the prep for this meeting and these webinars, I'm just more blown away by his ability to synthesize human needs and put them into truly useful technology. So Osama, can you join me up here for your presentation?
I’m going to invite Indrani and Tara to go ahead and start taking some of the questions if you feel like it in the chat window. And I just feel like we've got such a great group here with such great questions, let's see, where is Osama? We're still working, but let's take a question right now. And then as soon as Osama jumps on, we will handle that.
Shelly Spencer is asking Indrani “for the non-text interfaces that you work on, what are the hardware requirements? Do you need tablets? Do you need smartphones like geo? I mean, this really goes to the root of these applications and these interfaces look beautiful, but what are we requiring of people on the ground in terms of form factors?” maybe Indrani and Tara, you can both take that while we're waiting for Osama.
Speaker:
Dr. Indrani Medhi Thies
Principal Researcher
Microsoft Research India
[00:38:43]
Dr. Indrani Medhi Thies:
Great question. We’ve built prototypes also on lower-end phones, which are not smartphones. I mean, increasingly we do see some smartphones in the communities that we work with. So to answer your question, some of the prototypes that we've built are on lower-end phones that are not a smartphone, so yeah.
Speaker:
Tara Hopkins
Co-Director
Mali Health
[00:39:25]
Tara Hopkins:
This was a really pivotal point for us as again like we were a little bit out of our element as not a tech organization, and Revi I'll never forget the guidance that you offered to us. And so we had initially intended for our intervention to be on both a simple cell phone and a smartphone. But as we got into it, we realized that that was going to be immensely more challenging than we had intended because we knew cell phone penetration was very high while smartphones were there. And most women could access them either via a friend, a neighbor, or a husband. Most of them didn't have one of their own. So we were very cautious of just designing for a smartphone, but then we said, look, that's the future, as women move more online, work becomes more available.
Smartphones become more affordable and the accessibility and affordability are why we paired this project with inclusion work because we wanted to look at the connection. If women had more resources, would this technology and the health information that was on it, be something that they could afford with some of this financial inclusion work. So with Revi’'s kind of guidance and blessing, we did move forward with the entire voice-based interface on the touch phone.
I remember really dreading that decision and not really understanding and knowing how to attempt to make that decision. But with Revi blessing me, that's why basically we did that second round of user testing, but it's still something that costs and still something that can be an obstacle.
Speaker:
Dr. Revi Sterling
Women Connect Challenge Director
[00:41:23]
Dr. Revi Sterling:
Well honestly, it wasn't my blessing or anything. It was the lessons I learned from folks like Indrani quite frankly who I'm just like, oh, let's take a look at the research and what it says. So I'm glad we got this little intermission in, but I'm going to turn it over. I'm going to kick you both off stage now that I've invited you back on, and we're going to turn things over to Osama, we are so glad you're able to join us. Thank you.
Speaker:
Osama Manzar
Founder and Director
Digital Empowerment Foundation
[00:41:45]
Osama Manzar
Thanks, Ravi. I'm extremely sorry, living in India, it's good to have this real-time experience of what could be non-meaningful connectivity or not a good broadband. Anyway, I hope everybody can hear me and thank you very much for inviting me. I'm glad to be here. I see a lot of enthusiasm from the people who are there, who are watching, and lots of questions coming. I wanted to say that it's a beautiful presentation that Indrani gave and Mali is research that has shown what I'm going to talk about. By the way, I'm not an academician. I'm on the job, you know, field worker, in the digital field, but more from the perspective of, you know, practice on the ground.
So you can see this first screen on your computer. There is a lady who has got a mobile in her hand, and there are a whole lot of icons that are there in her ecosystem. You know, this actually is the highlight and the enabling symbol of women empowerment. I would say we trained 10,000 women this year. We trained about 2 million to 5 million in the last three years. And what we learned from the ground, and of course, Indrani has done a hardcore research. But our experience is that whenever you go to the field and work with women at work with the villagers to work with the people, what we call them, very discriminately, low literate people, or a lowest skill people, which we should not, they're actually extremely intelligent, but we don't provide them the machine and the technology that actually is as per their medium, you know, so then they figure out what's their medium in the machine that we gave or in the digital device that we gave or in the medium that we gave.
That is what we learned that they want. Most of these populations are very, very oral, you know, and their medium is oral. Their script is sign and digital, you know, over a period of time, you must have seen that in the last 10 years, all the texts have vanished and all the emojis and all the symbols have come back on our devices, which is extremely enabling. So if you send a message to somebody in the village, you will get a reply, but not in text, you will get either in audio or a video or something like that.
So that has become extremely enabling. This is very symbolic, but then the next slide is, this is how we work in the field. You know, there's this girl or a woman for her, this device, these devices are basically the symbols.
You know, if you want to take a photograph archiving local stories, or you want to play a game, you want to build a knowledge or you want to listen, or do you want to watch there is a symbol? I mean, she doesn't need to know, or he doesn't need to know any of these letters, and you can do whatever work that you are doing if you go to the entertainment, our entire entertainment access in villages is through symbols, you know, through icons and through caricatures through memes and so on and so forth.
Working in the heritage, we do a lot of archiving of heritage. None of our digital foot soldiers are written literate, you know, or written educated, but they all do an amazing job of archiving and collecting data, putting them into the computers and so on and so forth. They don't have to go through the alphabets of English or Hindi or anything else. So it is sector wise, you know, you have to see how you can use digital as a medium, digital as a language, and in a particular area like health, you know, for example, or health worker in a village would like to use video conferencing facility to connect with a doctor, to get a diagnosis for a lactating mother beside her, that's job done. She is digitally literate, digitally enabled, and also health information is taken care of.
In terms of education I would say education-accessing material, which is actually making you education enabled, is skill-enabled training, enabled job, enabled livelihood, you know, all that comes into education.
Most of them are coming through symbols. If you want to communicate today, 99% of all communication today that takes place on WhatsApp is all without using text by the people whom we call low literate people, you know, most of them are doing their job for them. That is Google for them. That is Gmail for them. That is bad for them. That is like a presentation. Everything is taking place there itself in an audio visual manner. I'm talking about millions of people. So what we have been doing is that most of our curriculum, most of our training material are also symbol based, gamification based touch and field based with a hashtag.
You actually download this one and make a paper, cardboard, and then put them together like a box. And all these symbols are basically teaching you and making you learn how you can use computers. For example, we work in hundreds of villages. Now, when we call them, they call themselves mobile Sakhi. Sakhi is a sister in Hindi. They call themselves mobile Didi, which is like a mobile sister, you know, so they are the elder sister or the sister, and some of them, when they're a little girl, they will call them digital Beatty. You know, I'm, I'm a digital daughter. And all this is actually also helping in a very fainting way, fighting patriarchy, you know this very strong toolkit in the hands of women and the way they are using it.
And these are all real examples that I'm giving you. These quotes are from those women, the girls, in the villages that are giving. I just marinate a hashtag of how the woman called themselves and how a woman is either is a symbol of so many things that you can do with just one mobile and one printer or something like that. At the moment, while I'm talking to you, we are training 10,000 women entrepreneurs giving them one tablet or one smartphone and one printer to become an entrepreneur. And they are providing each and every service that is possible to village level, earning money and doing social work, you know, and most of them are not what we call as literate, educated or qualified.
These are all case studies. This is a case study book. I can give it to all of you to download. All these women are a case study of various parts of the country in rural areas. And they all are so-called illiterate uneducated, but they all are doing great work using computers or tablets or smartphones and making their life much more easy and eventful and contextual in that manner. You can see these girls sitting with a laptop and there is a box below the laptop. That is a box of what you call gamification, of a literacy kit or a digital literacy kit, or information literacy kit that they play among themselves.
They learn from each other, and that is how they use various gadgets. And this is a case study that I'm going to send you the link, which is actually showing what everybody said is that there is a serious issue of, you know, a woman digital divide, and our patriarchal society has kept our women much away from the digital. And what is very, very important in our learning is how we can enable women to have devices in their hands and have everything. Everything will come back with enablement and empowerment, and unlike giving a digital device to a man, if you give to a woman, a family becomes literate and empowered, the whole peer group becomes empowered. And of course you also in hindsight fight the patriarchy. So that's all I have to share, but I'm happy to reply to any question that you may have.
Speaker:
Dr. Revi Sterling
Women Connect Challenge Director
[00:51:54]
Dr. Revi Sterling:
Wow. I mean, you're blowing people away. I knew you would, I'm so delighted that you were part of this, thank you so much. That was a beautiful presentation, and it really synthesizes everything that Indrani and Tara talked about. I'm inspired to share one sort of interesting outcome of using symbols and symbology and text free interfaces.
It was a project that I did. I had a wonderful PhD student named Leslie Dodson. She's now Dr. Leslie Johnson, and she's doing incredible work in technology and development. She was working in Southwest Morocco with Berber villages where unrelated men and women couldn't use cell phones to talk back to each other for social norms and get the development agency funding. It was a water project. People kept saying you have to communicate back and forth and you have to communicate. People are saying we can't, it puts us in danger. It affects our social status. It affects me, it affects mobility. It affects everything. You know, these are the gender norms in our communities. And the donor was a little deaf to that.
But what Leslie ended up doing is based on the work that Indrani had done. And of course right in line with Osama's work. And what Tara was talking about was by using icon symbols, it actually took the gender problems sort of out of the way, because anyone could go through the phone as husbands would do in this community at the end of the day and say, oh, she really is just talking about the water project. Here's six faucets and a geographical marker and a thumbs up or a thumbs down. And it became a way where women were allowed to use technology because it was trusted.
It was transparent. And it really was a way of affecting the social norms, affecting people's abilities to work within the social norms that really governed their life, but also exchange information. So I'm so excited by this. I think that most of the questions we've been getting have been around “How do we get these apps?” and that's always interesting because Indrani’s was very research-based. Taras said that we didn't give them a lot of money in round one to make this a scalable project, but she can talk about that otherwise.
And, Osama, I know you have lots of foot soldiers on the ground to get your literacy. How do people get started helping people either to use your work or open source versions of it or create their own? It's kind of an open-ended question, but I think that's what most people want to know.
Speaker:
Osama Manzar
Founder and Director
Digital Empowerment Foundation
[00:54:17]
Osama Manzar:
No, I think the most important thing is access. Number one, you have told it it's wrong. You have told everybody the taxes are the first thing. The second thing is the contextualization of devices and software, according to their individual usage or the community usage. And that is where the training is. It doesn't have to be related to digital or information. Your training has to be, how do you use and relate the contextualization? Do you need it for health? Do you need it for accounting? Do you need it for payment? Do you need it for photography? Do you need it for selling products? Do you need it for downloading a unique ID? Or do you want to frame a photo? You figure it out, don't talk about digital literacy. Don't talk about information literacy.
If at all, you need to talk, talk about critical thinking. That means you don't receive information and key forwarding without knowing whether it is forwardable or not. So the idea is not digital literacy or information literacy. The idea is medium media and information literacy. There is a device in your hand, how, and for what purpose, figure out the purpose, and then only you, you do the training capacity building and things like that.
In many ways you don't have to put an academic load on learning and education. If the entertainment sells more, ask them to first download a movie, you know, access a movie, because that is the route to go to develop some educational element out of it. You know, most of the digital literacy I have seen that has happened is through watching movies on YouTube. The poor people and the people who, what we call as low literacy have as much right to entertainment as anybody else.
We go with our subjectivity thinking that they need to just learn this and that and feel secure and you know, privacy and all that. I mean, we have learned everything previously. It didn't matter to us and suddenly privacy and security becomes the first barrier for them to become digitally literate, you know? We try to be more puristic when we ask the technology to go to them, you don't have to be puristic, you know, you don't need to, don't let it be black and white. There is life in gray.
Speaker:
Dr. Revi Sterling
Women Connect Challenge Director
[00:56:49]
Dr. Revi Sterling:
There is absolutely life in gray, Tara and Indrani, what do you say about how you counsel people who want to get started in this space? In terms of maybe applications, or who's doing work that we should know. Are there apps that are available that people should be using right now? Taurus is available on Android, but it would take somebody to take it from Bombora and maybe put it into Wolof or hula. There's so many unwritten languages, let alone low literacy populations. What about all the oral languages out there?
Speaker:
Dr. Indrani Medhi Thies
Principal Researcher
Microsoft Research India
[00:57:30]
Dr. Indrani Medhi Thies:
So I would suggest looking up the work of Novana Tech, they are developing all these apps and a tech app called Subhan. I can write it down. It's actually available on the play store. I mean, there's like one nine STKs. You just have to write one line of code to get it on. So it's basically a voice output for any functional units. So it's available on the play store.
Speaker:
Tara Hopkins
Co-Director
Mali Health
[00:58:09]
Tara Hopkins:
I think I would just say for ours we did work with a local partner intentionally, especially with our initial kind of project inception in mind. There were some other services like connection to a digital marketplace, for example, that would be great for the women in our program. So what our technology is now is built on a very simple technology, which is just the interface. So it's the ability for women to download content and have that stored and saved in their phone so they can listen to it when they need it. And then the ability to record it and send that off to have it answered by a physician at their community health center. And so that work is very straightforward and very simple. There are some images still, again with different types of communication and some visual cues as well.
It's designed to not be very big files and not use a ton of bandwidth and save space on the phones. So of course it could be adapted to other languages, and that is not something that we're planning to do. But I do know that there are several space interfaces out there. One or two in West Africa that are accessible. And certainly we are a small community organization. We did not think that we could create the technology we did.
Speaker:
Dr. Revi Sterling
Women Connect Challenge Director
[00:59:47]
Dr. Revi Sterling:
Well, that is a fabulous way to end because we're all focused, you know, and putting back to what is appropriate, For the people that we are working with, what do they want, what are their needs, what are their aspirations? I'm thrilled.
We do have to wrap it up. I know we could go forever, but we're already starting to lose people. Apparently other people have things to do besides webinars. I'll let Tara and Osama get back to making such great changes in their communities. Huge contributions to the research community. I’m so delighted to have everybody here today. I know we didn't get everybody's questions, but you can send them to me. My email is in the chat somewhere. I'll put it back in. I loved all your questions.
Thank you for coming. Lots of people put in things that are pointers to other apps, storytelling, etc. If you need things to know about avatars, personally text me and I'll pull the people into it. The biggest award of all, you know, my deepest gratitude is to you three for sharing this and finishing off our Women Connect Challenge webinars series. Thank you so much. Thank you for the work you do. Thank you for your incredible brains and hearts.
[END TRANSCRIPT: 01:01:03]