Towards a design model for women's empowerment in the developing world

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof argues that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world. In this paper, we present a design model for empowering low-income women in the developing world, in ways that cut across individual application areas. Specifically, this model characterizes a possible trajectory for NGOs and women to engage with each other and among themselves potentially augmented by technology to help women escape from poverty. The fieldwork components in this study took place over 15 weeks in three phases, with a total of 47 NGO staff members and 35 socio-economically challenged women in rural and urban India. Interviews and co-design sessions with seven proof-of-concept prototypes showed that women appeared to belong to five distinct stages of growth in striving towards independence. We report the technology design lessons from our co-design sessions to illustrate how user readiness, relationship building at the community and family levels, and integration with state, national and international level programs, should be taken into account in the broader context of intervention design.