Empowerment of Women Self Help Groups: Human Centered Design of a Participatory IoT solution

Empowering women, is one of the major challenges experienced in several developing countries. This is majorly due to lack of education, minimal community engagement and less exposure to mobile phones and mobile applications, age difference, and varying skills. To address this issue, several women self-help groups have been formed worldwide to provide the opportunity for them to engage in several livelihood activities. This paper discusses one of the proposed design for the Internet of Things based solution for empowering women in India. This solution is intended to be used by the rural cluster based organizations intended to work for the social and economic well-being of the rural community. This research details the requirements for empowering such rural community based organizations. However, the existing solutions lack the perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use; contributing to the failure of several technical innovations. This prompted us to dive deeper into insights of human centered and user centered approaches. This persuaded us in designing a human centered approach based mobile IoT solution. This paper details the key design parameters integrated for the success of this innovation and the different functionalities required for creating an effective solution for enhancing the communication, dissemination and empowerment of women self-help groups. This paper details requirements and learning’s from AmritaSREE, one of the women Self Help Groups having more than 300000 members in India. The paper also details the approaches by which this solution can be used by AmritaSREE group for achieving financial stability and self empowerment.