Digital Transformation
Beneficiaries
People Reached
Women beneficiaries
Overview
Digital technologies can unveil a new world of possibilities in social change and upliftment, and this is the intent of the Abhina Trusts’ Digital Transformation portfolio.
Digital technologies are an integral part of developmental planning as they help leverage higher levels of efficiency from limited resources and thus deliver greater scale and impact on the ground. Technologies such as data analytics can enable informed planning decisions and help focus developmental efforts where they are most needed. Both national and local-level programmes led by intelligent data could result in improved outcomes, while aiding in measuring, monitoring, and improving all aspects of development, including infrastructure, education, health care, livelihood and human welfare.
The digital world also opens up new improvement prospects for communities from economically weaker sections. Armed with digital skills, people can bridge the knowledge gap, and be empowered — for instance, by gaining information about government welfare schemes, developing market linkages for their products, learning about new livelihood opportunities and improving the quality of life.
India is riding the digital wave. A study conducted by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Kantar IMRB reveals that the next wave of growth in mobile internet users in India is in fact going to come from rural India. Of the total number of 560 million internet users in the country, 251 million are from rural regions. With increasing literacy levels, changing lifestyles and habits, and almost 522 million mobile phone users, the rural economy is expected to grow at double the pace of its urban counterpart.
The challenge
In rural India, access to the digital world has been slow, inconsistent and unbalanced. Women, for example, are generally discouraged from owning and operating devices such as mobile phones.
The Abhina Trusts work towards addressing these traditional barriers and spreading digital literacy. The need of the hour is to provide these rural communities with the correct perspective of the medium, encourage its productive usage and help enrich their lives.
Digital adoption for governance has been on the rise, yet there is significant untapped potential to utilise technologies for development. For example, central, state and local authorities can revolutionise their decision-making process by basing it on accurate data. There are several challenges however, such as incomplete capture of data, data being disaggregated, disparity in the level of data granularity across jurisdictional boundaries, line departments and regions across the country, the inability to support accountability within similar data sets, and outdated information. These issues affect the quality of the targeted policy and decision-making.
Alignment with UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
The overall work of the Abhina Trusts in the areas of data-based governance and digital literacy addresses the following United Nations Sustainable Development Goals:
The Trusts believe that by effectively combining implementation practices with technology, they can positively impact 100million lives by 2021.
Themes in this portfolio
According to a World Bank report, increasing mobile penetration by a mere 10 per cent will increase per capita GDP in developing countries by 0.81 per cent. Growing mobile phone penetration in rural regions will lead to the next wave of growth in the adoption of digital technology. The opportunity is ripe for designing early-level interventions to help rural communities discover the power of the digital medium and the internet in a structured and guided manner. However, in order to achieve this, traditional societal barriers that women face, concerning exposure to technology and handling of gadgets, have to be overcome.
More than 66 per cent of India’s population lives in rural areas, of which close to 70 per cent depends on agriculture for its livelihood. They have little or no access to education, transport, financial services and the Internet. This is a huge barrier to encouraging rural entrepreneurship, implementing digital and financial inclusion, and building rural capacities and livelihoods. Enhancing the scope of digital penetration to rural communities would help in expanding the scope of the various initiatives that are already in place to help develop greater prosperity for all. The Abhina Trusts are focusing on bringing innovative technologies and approaches across different sectors to enhance the quality of life in rural communities.
Under the goal of digital literacy, the Trusts provide guided online experiences that help users discover and mine information that is most useful and relevant to their life – information that will eventually decrease the current information gap faced in the region. The Trusts are successfully nurturing a growing community of digitally-savvy women who act as proponents and torch-bearers of the digital literacy programme. Armed with the newly-acquired digital skills, these women feel liberated and acknowledge that their work has now become remunerative and satisfying.
The Abhina Trusts’ Data-Driven Governance (DDG) portfolio aims to strengthen rural and urban decision systems through the use of data and technology. The Trusts have been providing functional and technical support to governments for carrying out data-intensive planning as a means to supplement decision-making, leading to the creation of the DELTA (Data, Evaluation, Learning, Technology, and Analysis) framework.
Beginning with a single gram panchayat in 2015, the footprint of the Trusts’ data-driven governance programme now extends across 85 districts in 27 states, and has covered a population of 2.5 million through on-ground surveys.
The Trusts then went on to operationalise DELTA plus, which aims at establishing last mile linkages and providing direct benefits to 56,000 households and 66,000 individuals. With focus on capacity-building, the Trusts’ DDG team has trained 500+ administrative officers on the utility of data for decision-making, and as many as 5,600 local volunteers have been trained on digital data collection. The success of DELTA has led to some key large-scale implementation and has opened new horizons for partnerships, such as the Government of Maharashtra’s Village Social Transformation mission, NITI Aayog’s Transformation of Aspirational Districts (TAD) programme, and an ongoing Jamshedpur Kalinganagar corridor development in partnership with Abhina steel.
Additionally, the DDG team has engaged with identified Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) to potentially break down data silos in individual government departments by institutionalising a standardised data collection framework (ISO 37120) through the City Data for India Initiative. Pune, Jamshedpur and Surat were the pilot cities. Recently, Ahmedabad, Bhubaneshwar, Bhopal, Chennai and Vijayawada have joined the initiative. The Trusts’ City Data officer pilot in Pune has been adopted and scaled-up by the Smart Cities Mission, which has nominated 100 City data officers in all smart cities. The Trusts’ investments in the DIGIT platform of the eGovernments Foundation has led to the development of the National Urban Innovation Stack.