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United Kingdom
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Category:
Economic Development
Operational areas:
Rural
Vision, objectives and goals:
The iShakti vision is to catalyse rural development in India through increased health and business awareness, dissemination of knowledge through online learning, and by promoting community sharing of best practice across regions. Content partners, including CARE International and the Azim Premji Foundation, ensure that the information provided is relevant to the rural users and truly aids development of the region.
The key objectives of the iShakti project are to:
- Alleviate poverty and aid development in rural India; by generating income for self-help groups, and by providing education, information and job opportunities for local people
- Provide access to services, information and advice on social, economic and recreational needs; which would otherwise be unavailable in rural India
- Raise awareness of health and hygiene
- Provide the infrastructure to share knowledge and experience between otherwise isolated communities
- Provide access to personalised advice through one-to-one communication with experts in domains including health, law and agriculture
- Create a highly personalised user experience; through innovative user-profiling
- Improve understanding of consumers in rural India
From an initial pilot of eight villages in the Nalgonda district, Andhra Pradesh, iShakti has now been deployed to tens of thousands of villages, with several hundred thousand users.
How ICT contributes to the organisational objectives:
The impact of iShakti is actively monitored through usage statistics, user feedback and qualitative/quantitative data gathered in the local communities. These are just some of the measured impacts:
- High usage: 9.5 hours daily at 98% capacity. Most highly valued services: health, legal, education, agriculture, games
- High reach and increasing loyalty: 33% of the covered population / 78% of households register, repeat usage 25% and rising
- Early qualitative indicators of positive impact on socio-economic development of local communities; through health, hygiene, agriculture, education and employment services
- Shakti entrepreneurs have seen a measurable and significant increase in their customer base and sales
- Positive user feedback on the value of the information provided and responses by experts to posted questions
- Web Banner impressions achieved in iShakti between October 2004 and December 2005
- General Advertising Banners - 3,957,561 views
- Content Sponsorship – 2,198,645 page views
iShakti has surpassed all expectations and is the first self-sustainable system to succeed on this scale. It has successfully overcome numerous technical and infrastructure challenges to provide a robust working system and business platform. The social and economic benefits it is bringing are impressive even at this early stage.
Some of the feedback collected form the community users is provided below:
“When I don’t know something, I know where to go. I don’t have to be afraid anymore” (farmer)
“There was an insect attack on my brinjal crop. iShakti recommended a treatment. I am happy with the effect and have recommended it to other farmers.” (farmer)
“I lost sheep worth Rs. 100,000. Through iShakti I got a prescription for a medicine - the sheep are safe now” (farmer)
“I got 40% discount on doctor appointments and treatments” (mother/housekeeper)
“Children are addicted to the on-line tutorials - there is always full attendance on the day of iShakti lessons” (teacher)
Summary:
iShakti is the ICT component of project Shakti, a project providing Indian women’s self-help groups with business skills and income-generating opportunities through the sale of a range of Hindustan Lever products.
iShakti provides information and services to meet a range of rural development needs for the whole community, and also supports Shakti entrepreneurs’ business development. Many organisations act as content partners using iShakti as a communication channel to rural communities.
The iShakti information ‘kiosk’ is operated and hosted by the Shakti Entrepreneur. It provides a web-portal with content relevant to the rural audience. Local users can access information on categories including education, employment, agriculture, health, e-governance, personal care, and entertainment. They can post queries on these subjects to local experts who respond within 48 hours.
Rural telephone connections are often unreliable, preventing routine Internet use. iShakti uses highly efficient and robust synchronisation to allow new content to be delivered to an autonomous village-based PC. This enables IT-based information and services to be delivered to regions where this was previously difficult or impossible.
This innovative approach is bringing new opportunities to rural India and is positively affecting lives, as well as inspiring other ICT projects in the rural development sector in India.
Competition year:
2006