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Empowering women is critical to achieving social and economic gains - for women themselves, for communities and for societies. Women鈥檚 Empowerment Collectives and the Power of Digital: A Research and Learning Agenda is a three-year project to identify how technology can enhance pathways to empowerment in women鈥檚 collectives, without worsening inequalities.

There is promise of progress in organising women into empowerment collectives, including self-help groups. In India, where women in 124 million households have been mobilised into 10.2 million self-help groups since 2011, the scale of this opportunity is significant.

The exponential growth of mobile phone use also holds potential for helping women to gain employment, obtain cost-effective health services and education, and increase their income. By 2025, India is predicted to overtake the United States as a 鈥渟martphone superpower鈥�, second only to China, with more than 1.1 billion smartphone connections.

But this digital growth is also exacerbating inequalities. Although more than 93% of households now own a phone in India, only an estimated 52% of women have access to these phones. In 2019, only 14% of adult women in India owned a smartphone and in 2020, only 9% of adult women in India had used social media. Wealth, education and gender norms all prevent women from accessing these phones.

The Digital Women鈥檚 Economic Empowerment project is collaborating with grassroots women's collectives in several Indian states to answer research questions establishing how technology can enhance empowerment, how private sector drivers might be leveraged to deliver digital solutions to these collectives at scale, and how we can apply learning from digital social movements and campaigns to women's collectives in low-resource settings. 

We are applying our research insights to co-create and test digital solutions with collectives in India. Read the insights from our research and learning agenda below.

Publication: May 2021

Authors: Alexandra Tyers, Catherine Highet, Sara Chamberlain, Arjun Khanna

Overview: There are many initiatives to increase women鈥檚 digital literacy in India - but no body of knowledge establishing evidence for which are most effective. Our first report, Increasing women鈥檚 digital literacy in India: what works, shares the results of our landscaping study to:

• Review digital literacy definitions and frameworks to identify those most relevant to women鈥檚 empowerment in India
• Review key initiatives that aimed to improve women鈥檚 digital literacy in India (and where useful, in other countries), to identify what has worked and what has not, and what gaps in evidence exist
• Identify implementation approaches and business models that show promise of sustainability at scale.

Publication: September 2021

Authors: Dr Eric Rice, Sara Chamberlain

Overview: This report, based on research conducted with women's empowerment collectives (self help groups, co-operatives, rights-based groups, trade unions) in India in late 2019, explores the relationship between the expansion of women's social networks in collectives, their growing empowerment, and their adoption and meaningful use of digital technologies.

Publication: February 2022

Authors: Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon, Arjun Khanna

Editors: Sara Chamberlain, Alexandra Tyers-Chowdhury

Overview: India has more users of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and other social media platforms than anywhere else in the world. But in 2021, advertising data indicated that less than 10% of India's women were using Facebook or YouTube, 3.5% were using Instagram and only 0.1% were using Twitter.

This report explores how women in India are using social media, to better understand the gaps and challenges. It covers women's access to mobile phones, the internet and social media; their online behaviour, and the normative environment that women must navigate, including gender-based violence online. It concludes with recommendations for how these findings could be applied to the gender intentional design of digital solutions.

Project information