Meri Awaaz Meri Pehchan (MAMP) undertaken by - Gram Vaani

Innovators in India are relying on the ICT to empower women. Yet, experiences have shown that this doesn’t hold in case of women in the rural regions, for they often find themselves at the receiving end of triple divides – gender, rural-urban and digital.

To resolve this situation Gram Vaani has built a novel mobile-based community media platform – Meri Awaaz Meri Pehchan to accelerate women's access to technology and to empower them. It is based on simple IVR technology and it doesn’t cost them anything. This platform enables women to create their own content, which is relevant and useful to them. It also provides them safe forum to discuss their issues.

The platform also enables local women to interact with other critical local stakeholders like elected representatives, teachers, health workers etc. Lastly, we are training the active women to be community reporters and to editorially manage the platform themselves.

97% of everything you know about yourself, your country and your world
comes from the male perspective. It means that in a democracy where you
talk about equality and full participation, you’ve got more than half of
the population not participating.” Carol Jenkins

The 2018 Global Gender Gap Index report ranks India at a dismal 108 out of 149 countries. Literacy rate of women in India, as per the 2011 census, is 64.46 percent compared to the male literacy rate of 82.14 percent.

Women in rural regions in India not only lack physical and financial resources, they also face location related disadvantages as far as new opportunities of livelihoods are concerned. Discriminatory gender norms obstruct women’s every attempt to create their space in the male dominated territories. As a result, they often do not speak even at the democratic forums, wherein presence of men is strong. Further, latent and patent social norms and lower literacy rates among women also negatively affect their access to technology. Hence, although the penetration of mobile phones in India in rural households has been high, women lack exclusive ownership over the phone.

Rural and low-income Indians are under-served by media, which offers a little information useful for the poor. The problem is compounded by barriers of illiteracy and affordability. Thus the watchdog role which media must play in a democracy - to strengthen local governance and welfare - is ineffective, where it is most needed: among the poor and vulnerable. The situation with respect to poor women and the media is even worse. Access is a greater challenge for women due to patriarchal norms. Poor coverage of women in the media further reinforces a male perspective compounding the marginalization of women’s perspectives. Self-expression is empowering but there are few platforms where women can safely voice their concerns, learn from peers and grow their capabilities.

We addresses this challenge by building a novel mobile-based community media platform operated by women through collective structures that accelerate their access to technology, enable their creation of content which is useful for them, and provide safe forum to discuss their issues which can alter social norms and even strengthen local governance. Our bottom-up media platform fosters peer learning and collective action among women users, provide them actionable information to guide progressive practices and claims to entitlements.

We have developed an IVRS technology based platform called Mobile Vaani (MV) to deliver community generated media content through simple mobile phones and facilitated discussions around various development themes. The IVR platform runs in an integrated manner with the MV mobile-smart app, which makes the same content accessible through data m-services on Android smartphones. We identified and trained Community Reporters (CRs) and Trainee Reporters (TRs). The CRs and TRs are regularly trained and hand-held for various aspects of gender, government schemes, community entitlements, mobile use etc. These reporters mobilize the community members to encourage them for using this platform. CRs and TRs also spread awareness around gender discriminating practices and facilitate shift in attitude and behaviors toward the existing discrimination. We ensured that the CRs and TRs work closely with the community members to help them access various schemes and entitlements, especially, the ones designed to achieve women empowerment. 

Our platform encourages women to use mobile phones to engage with it by pressing various keys (e.g. 3 to record, 5 to forward the item and so on). Hence, women no longer consider mobile phone merely as a tool to receive calls. Instead, they now understand that it is a multi-purpose device. The project strategy for digital empowerment of community women involves capacitating women trainee reporters to become women leaders; it involves (but not restricted to) vetting user recorded audio content on the IVRS platform and publishing them for other listeners. This editorial decentralization is now possible due to recently developed distributed moderation interface. We built it for the women at the grassroots and made it accessible on the existing MV app.

The initiative is truly inclusive. It is led by women for content generation, moderation as well as consumption. Secondly, the offline activities of volunteers ensure that women from even the most excluded community participate in the discussion on the platform.

The MV platform is designed as federated network of decentralized clubs, and therefore scaling and replicability come naturally to the setup by being able to establish new clubs in an incremental manner entirely independent of each other.

An MLE plan is already designed to track and understand the nuances of the processes driving the change engendered by the platform intervention, using data from a combination of IVR-generated quantitative and qualitative information, and regular field-based interactions with the volunteers and users. All interactions on the IVR platform are measurable.l

Technology platform: The platform delivers community-generated media content through simple mobile phones not requiring Internet connectivity, and facilitate discussions around various development themes. The platform has capabilities to skip forward/ go back on a list of audio content, record their thoughts/opinions, like/share a piece of content over an SMS/voice call, all by pressing single buttons. It runs via a missed call system - wherein users give a missed call to a unique ten digit phone number promoted among the target group, making it a free of cost service, and they receive a callback from the Mobile Vaani server to start engagement over the phone call. The IVR platform runs in an integrated manner with the Mobile Vaani application which makes the same content accessible through data services on Android smartphones

Content processes: Being a purely participatory platform, content planning is initiated with a content needs assessment of the target group. The content is in Hindi, and can also be suitably extended to other languages to reach out to the populations beyond the immediate geographies. The majority of the content is user generated, which includes people’s reactions and feedback to published content, or thoughts/opinions of other users shared on the platform.

Further, speech-to-text technology will be used to automatically transcribe the recorded audio and improve its quality by removing silences through the use of voice-activity-detection libraries.

Additionally, we are already in the process of building machine-learning driven content recommendation algorithms eliminates problems of echo chambers.

The platform impacts through the three pathways

Pathway 1: Awareness, reflection & opinion-forming through peer learning: The conversational nature of the platform encourages users to share their thoughts and experiences, and for others to comment on them. Those in comparable circumstances learn powerfully from each other and the community collectively gains a more nuanced understanding of the topics by listening to diverse views and experiences, which sharpen their thinking. This approach to knowledge and attitude change has been validated in several settings in many projects done by Gram Vaani.

Pathway 2: Self-action and behavior change through actionable information: Actionable information created by Gram Vaani from a close reading of local context and augmented by users’ experience, raises awareness and inspires action. We have gathered the testimonies shared give further impetus to change. The solidarity harnessed from shared platform participation cascades behavior change in the wider group. 

Pathway  3: Accountability and collective action through media presence: Following increased awareness and the emergence of a sense of collective, the community media platforms are able to exercise their weight in holding local power holders accountable for their actions and responsibilities. Stories of redressal of grievances in government schemes, greater representation of women in community decision-making, and collective action initiated by the volunteers, are frequently shared on the Mobile Vaani platforms

Gram Vaani through its Mobile Vaani platform has touched the lives of over 2 million people.

The initiative Meri Awaz Meri Pehchan targets twenty five thousand women in the Nalanda district of Bihar state.

With the same approach, we aim to target seventy five thousand women in different districts during next year. In the next five years, we intend to reach out to around 1 million women in different backward regions of India and Ethiopia.

The Mobile Vaani (MV) platform uses the basic voice-based and participative technology innovatively to offer even poor users a free community media channel. It also facilitates collective behaviour change effectively. This simple and community-specific nature of MV makes it versatile and relevant for various developmental issues prevalent in multiple socio-economic contexts. MV has been operational since last six years in 25+ districts across Indian states and it caters to more than 2 million households. To date, MV has been used by 150+ partners and government departments to create awareness and to promote behaviour change in the domains of agriculture, health, nutrition, financial inclusion, gender empowerment etc. It clocked more than 12 million calls & 500,000+ voice reports. In addition, with recent successes in speech technologies through deep-learning based methods we can now reach to larger population in accelerated manner. Based on these diverse experiences and added technological capacity we estimate scale of our direct impact for more than 50+ million people in near future. Moreover, voice based & participatory nature of MV makes it complimentary for the efforts of government departments, NGOs, CSRs, AgTech/HealthTech sectors. MV benefits them for providing their informational services to their target communities. Through these partnerships, potentially MV can positively impact 100+ million people in next 10+ years.

Mobile Vaani (MV) is primarily accessible through phones, so there is a risk of excluding the community members, who don’t have phones. So, we rely on alternate pathways for information dissemination. This includes community mobilization through engagement of volunteers like teachers, social workers, agricultural extension workers and reporters. We also encourage community members to listen to the MV in groups. Such field level activities ensure inclusion of diversified target audience.

Mobile Vaani (MV) pilot - Meri Awaz Meri Pehchan targeted around twenty five thousand people. Since we now aim to reach out to the target population of 1 million in next five years, we need additional team capacity and an approach based on partnership.

Gram Vaani is a social tech organisation, which aims to apply appropriate technology to resolve complex humanitarian issues prevalent in remote areas

Since, Mobile Vaani (MV) pilot experiment has been quite successful in achieving its goals, we have few champions committed to help us scale this innovation.

We plan to scale up our innovation through our partnership with the state-led entities such as - Jharkhand State Livelihoods Promotion Society (JSLPS), JEEViKA, Bihar and so on. JSLPS/JEEViKA are large network of women self-help groups (SHGs). We have been partnering with these organizations for various initiatives. We will harness these networks for the impact at scale.

The Mobile Vaani (MV) uses the basic voice-based and participative technology innovatively to offer even poor users a free community media channel. It also facilitates collective behaviour change effectively. This simple and community-specific nature of MV makes it versatile and relevant for various developmental issues prevalent in multiple socio-economic contexts. MV has been operational since last six years in 25+ districts across Indian states and it caters to more than 2 million households. To date, MV has been used by 150+ partners and government departments to create awareness and to promote behaviour change in the domains of agriculture, health, nutrition, financial inclusion, gender empowerment etc. It clocked more than 12 million calls & 500,000+ voice reports. In addition, with recent successes in speech technologies through deep-learning based methods we can now reach to larger population in accelerated manner. Based on these diverse experiences and added technological capacity we estimate scale of our direct impact for more than 50+ million people in near future.

We have been working with JEEViKA.

• Nalanda, Bihar: In our current intervention with the Bihar Rural Livelihood Promotion Society, BRLPS (funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), we are running the Mobile Vaani platform in the district of Nalanda (called JEEViKA Mobile Vaani), offering relevant information on maternal and child health to self-help-group members. The platform has been accessed by more than 25,000 women till now. In Bihar, we will ride upon this partnership with BRLPS to reach out to women already on the platform, and potentially expand the reach even beyond Nalanda. This outreach strategy has worked well in the current intervention, where we have even been able to demonstrate increased mobile phone usage over time, with 64% of women regularly bringing their phones to SHG meetings to listen to programmes, compared to 42% when we had just started the intervention

Gram Vaani is a social tech organisation, which aims to apply appropriate technology to resolve complex humanitarian issues prevalent in remote areas.

We have worked with over 50+ partners over the past three years across the spectrum of development themes and have as an organization generated an overall topline of around INR 20 Cr. over the past three years (cumulative - FY1617 to FY1819). Our revenues are a combination of Technology or platform sales based revenues (offered on a licensing or platform as a service model) and professional services support required to design, develop & deploy ICT for development initiatives for and in collaboration with partners.

The federated structure of local platforms brings together the best of both decentralization to ensure contextual relevance, and centralization to manage processes and technological infrastructure that can gain from economies of scale. Syndicated advertising by companies on the different local platforms is a key strategy we have evaluated successfully in the past. Mobile Vaani presents an equivalent of a digital marketing platform to companies interested in rural outreach. A second revenue stream is sponsored social campaigns on topics like early marriage and domestic violence, typically funded by the development sector. We are further planning to experiment with crowdfunding initiatives through various Internet-based platforms to raise funds on a per-campaign or geography-focus basis. With these different revenue streams put together, Mobile Vaani is already operationally breakeven. With a greater scale, advertising revenue will increase and make the network profitable to allow for further growth.

The digital workforce challenge is an excellent opportunity to showcase our efforts on ground, which have been hugely successful in making women in the poor region digitally literate and empowered.

We aim to reach out to further downtrodden, remote, tribal communities with our simple-vernacular and voice based tools. These communities have been aloof from the technological advances and with our approach we are
confident that we could make a positive change in terms of digital
empowerment of the community.If we win the prize, it will definitely help us scale the initiative - Meri Awaz Meri Pehchan to other similar backward region.  We expect that with the financial and skill based mentorship from ServiceNow, we will be more effective in achieving our goals.

The media opportunities, gained as a part of digital workforce challenge, would help us attract attention of the global and national stakeholders. It will definitely ignite the cascading effect and it may lead to similar initiatives in different locations. We see it as a great opportunity to make this world a better place in the longer run.