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Bolstering the She economy |
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Subject :WOMEN MEAN BUSINESS CONFERENCE BY THE CHERIE BLAIR FOUNDATION
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At the recently held Women mean Business conference by the Cherie Blair foundation, the clear, global call was for inclusive growth, with technology playing the key role.
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At the Women mean Business conference, held by the Cherie Blair Foundation of Women, in Mumbai on December 8, high-flying executives
came together to share their experiences with including technology in their businesses.
From smart revenue making moves to using it to build communities to examples of inclusivity, many stories were told by industry stalwarts
such as GE CEO Magaret Keane, Bio Con head Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and ICICI Securities head Madhabi Puri Buch.
But none touched a chord as much as the former first lady, Cherie Blair's confession of how she was introduced to technology.
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just as she was about to go on maternity leave and was working as a barrister.
"It meant I wouldn't have an assistant in the other room to type out my papers," she said. Necessity drove her to master
technology and she was later instrumental in bringing it to the judicial system.
"Because women are not serviced as well as men," she says, "It means we become early adopters of technology."
At the Women mean Business conference, held by the Cherie Blair Foundation of Women, in Mumbai on December 8, high-flying executives
came together to share their experiences with including technology in their businesses.
From smart revenue making moves to using it to build communities to examples of inclusivity, many stories were told by industry stalwarts
such as GE CEO Magaret Keane, Bio Con head Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and ICICI Securities head Madhabi Puri Buch.
But none touched a chord as much as the former first lady, Cherie Blair's confession of how she was introduced to technology. It was
just as she was about to go on maternity leave and was working as a barrister. "It meant I wouldn't have an assistant in the other room to
type out my papers," she said. Necessity drove her to master technology and she was later instrumental in bringing it to the
judicial system.
"Because women are not serviced as well as men," she says, "It means we become early adopters of technology." She went on to describe her
tryst with IT when she moved into 10 Downing Street as the spouse of the new Prime Minister of UK in 1997.
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"My husband had the latest,best, most well equipped computer in the office, while I was left to
make do with a clunky old one," she said. "And I can promise you this,that by the time we left No 10, I had put in many, many hours on my
rickety old one while my husband had not turned it on even once. He didn't have to. His assistant did all the typing, emailing for him.
ANd this is what I mean. When studies show that women are early adopters of technology, it's because they are not as well serviced as
men are. We sort of have to lump it up and do things ourselves." The first segment of the conference was introduced by actor Poonam
Dhillon who slipped in a plea to come together and donate old computers so that they could be put to better use. She too brought
home the point about being an early technology adopter. "I had a
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personal website as far back 1995, which I thought would work as a bio data. But I suppose I was too early," she said. "Today, you exist only if you have an online presence -- a Facebook account, a websit, if
your name comes up in a google search. As a mom, I use technology to multi-task. If my son in the US is making plans for a movie in the
evening, I can tell him which tube route to take, where to eat, etc." More important that multi-tasking to an entrepreneur, Reema Nanavaty,
general secretary of SEWA (Self Employed WOmen's Association), illustrated how technology helps educate, expand and include a rural
workforce with unconventional ways of education and literacy.
Many of the women in villages, who form SEWA's network, save up now to buy a mobile phone since mobile network has the kind of penetration in these areas rivaled only by Pepsi and Coke. Though not literate, these women
use mobile phones to communicate with the centre and the client and over see the production cycle. Niruben of Bhalej village in Gujarat, one of the self employed agricultural laborers, in the SEWA network talked about how she reacted to technology. "When I first got a mobile phone, I thought it
would give out current. I was so scared. When it vibrated, I threw it away," she said. "But now I use to find out the market rates, then relay them on to the supplier. It helps me find out information about
volume, quantity of a crop.
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Then I realized the need to update my inventory in real-time and now use a laptop with a special program that makes me do this."
The consensus was that the future belonged to the mobile phone and not computers.
Kiran Mazumdar Shaw of Bio Con all emphasized on the potential of tele-density and talked about how they tapped into it for their social projects. "We realized that we could use mobile phones for more than
just connectivity. The concept of a smartcard was important," she said. "For a micro insurance scheme in Karnataka, mobile phones were used to take pictures for IDs, to zap data to a central database." For
a Work Plus program, which educated gardeners, drivers, home-makers, older models of computers to teach them. "We found that showing pictures can leapfrog knowledge," Mazumdar said, "YouTube can be used to inculcate a hunger to learn, teach them the basic, function specific knowledge. By getting language entrenched, they can get access to research, patent information, bio information. We were able to build a eco-system of research systems, build a community irrespective of where the individual members are located."
Speaking about the She economy, Dr Rajnee Aggarwal, the president of the Federation of Indian Women Entrepreneurs, acknowledged that 30 per cent of new
mobile users are women and that it helps them desalinate, store and source data in a peer to peer, social networking sort of pattern; however Anju Malhotra, the
vice president for Research, Innovation and Impact, at ICRW contended that data about these users was lacking. "Neither the government is tracking this data,
nor making it available to small, medium and large enterprises. The private sector is not benefitting by the data collected by the NGOs or the government,"
she said, adding, "Technology has the power to change social conditioning, mobility, literacy and attitude.
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Women don't need a hand out; they need a hand up. A lot of content that is available is health and education data. The content
made available to them has to be specific to women who are not literate.Reema Nanavaty called for a multi-party collaboration to "make technology accessible, affordable and appropriate. NGOs can shape technology and use it to make the lives and livelihoods better."
Mitali Parekh
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