Dr Udita Ghosh Sarkar: Digitalization is the talk of the day. And bringing that to our community, this is what we dream of. We have a partnership with Tata Communications, one of the very big corporate houses in India. This group of women would be getting these smartphones, and in these smartphones you will have this app. It’s called POP because it’s a Package of Practice. The practice can be agricultural practice, it can be livelihood practice, it can be micro-enterprise practice.
In the agricultural function, you select a particular crop. Then you need to select the length and the breadth of your plot. One stick is this much. This gives you a crop analysis. After two days they need to do the weeding, and they need to water. You have dots at the base of the app, where it shows the number of days. One bindi is one day. She doesn’t need any guidance, she can do her cultivation herself.
The money exchange helps the participant to keep a note of all her transactions. She can send this money, she can receive this money and at the bottom, both the arrows indicate, it’s a transaction history.
Apart from the agricultural, you will have access to various government programs in the app. In our dashboard, we can see the entire profile of a particular participant in our office in Trickle Up.
When we hand over the handsets to them, we tell them to take a selfie, and we tell them that this is your phone. Apart from the other features, it boosts her self-esteem. It’s a sense of belongingness to her. Our aim is to give these smartphones to all our participants.
The mobile project with Tata is part of our vision to connect millions of women around the world. It is just one example of how partnerships are our pathway for scaling globally to help more people break the cycle of extreme poverty.