Helping Women Get Online

Objective

To empower 50 million women in India to get online by creating awareness of the benefits of the internet and teaching them digital literacy skills.

Overview and Main Activities

For the first stage, Google launched a mass media campaign targeted at women to promote a website (www.hwgo.com) that hosts self-help educational content covering the basics of internet and web content curated for women in India and available in Hindi, English, Marathi and Tamil. Google also launched a toll-free helpline number to assist women over the phone with any difficulties they face while accessing the internet for the first time.

The initiative was piloted at a village in Bhilwara, Rajasthan, where over 100,000 women were trained in digital literacy. This pilot was implemented in partnership with NGOs, including for example SEWA (Self Employed Women’s Association), the government and other private sector organizations, including Unilever, Samsung and Intel. Results from the pilot and subsequent activities helped to scale ground training programmes and partner with local organizations and state governments to expand to other states. Over 500,000 women – including over 150,000 girls and women in school and college, nearly 3,000 teachers and professors and more than 100,000 women from rural areas – were trained directly on internet usage.

To inspire women to do more with the internet, Google created ‘Hero Stories’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIx7QAcNpW0) of women who attended HWGO trainings and used the internet, leading to an improvement in quality of life for them and their families.

Internet access was enabled by launching ‘Internet Carts’: mobile carts with internet-enabled tablets that can go from place to place providing internet access free of cost to first-time users. Partnerships with a mobile handset manufacturing company and telecom companies provided smartphones at discounted prices and free internet for a limited period of time.

Through leveraging role models (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n54h4HC8HcU) in social media, for example famous Bollywood director and actor Farhan Akhtar, Google hopes to further generate awareness and to encourage existing internet users to help get more women online.

Key results:

• Over 2014, these measures helped contribute to a 35% increase in female internet users in urban India and a 36% increase in rural India.
• For the first time, the growth rate of internet among women in urban areas was greater than that of men – 35% to 31%.

Success Factors and Challenges

Most critical success factors:

• Community acceptance of the need and importance of the project
• Cultivating government partnerships
• Ensuring role of Google made clear in the beginning
• Training content tailored to local needs, understanding of the area and actual requirements

Main challenges:

• Language barrier
• Women in India are not very comfortable with manual self-read/self-learn modules
• Conservative bias towards women in some areas, which makes reaching women more difficult

Recommendations for Others

While awareness works well to generate interest, most women needed additional individual support. Inspiration is crucial; real-life stories had greater impact than TV commercials. Reliability, credibility and customization of the communication are key to grab their attention. Engage participants; start with a pilot, which can then be measured on an iterative basis. Leverage PR and government relations for scale and greater brand impact. Finally, provide direct internet access and identify and invest time with the right partners.

Replicability and Scalability

How easily could other organizations implement this initiative?
Very Easy: Platform is easily implemented and content is very simple and can be taught by anyone who has used the internet. Organizations can create their own trainers.

How easily can this initiative be expanded to include a larger number of participants?
Very Easy: Platform is scalable. A train-the-trainer model can empower community members to become ‘experts’, who then teach others.

About the Organization

Website: www.google.com
Sector: Information Technology
Size (number of employees): 50,000 – 100,000
Headquarters: Mountain View, United States

For Further Engagement

Contact name: Sandeep Menon
Contact position: Director of Marketing, India
Email: [email protected]