Funding
The project was funded by UN Women’s Regional Center of Excellence (RCoE), an UN organization dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women.
Execution and Impact
The Wi-Net platform was deployed in Mehabhoob Nagar District in Andra Pradesh with the active involvement of the local Zila Parishad (Block Development Office) in Oct 2012. The platform provided deep insights into the needs of the women representatives and how they interacted with the platform to both communicate this need and to learn from peers. The learnings from this project were to play a crucial role in the design and development of future mobile-based services that addressed the needs of gender-responsive governance in other south-east Asian countries that the UN Women focussed on. During the 4 months when the platform was tested, there were over 1500+ exchanges of information and queries among the selected 30 women elected representatives and other stakeholders within the project.
The Win-Net platform enables the women elected representatives to:
- use the visual and intuitive mobile app to network with one another to improve governance
- ask questions and seek answers from peers and other stakeholders such as the UN Women or Zila Parishad office
- share their knowledge in the form of audio, video or picture content with others on the platform
- use the ‘tagging’ capabilities to categorize the content that they share, making the discovery of such content easy
- gain knowledge by consuming content that others share within their network
