BACKGROUND: Starting in 2015, the ‘M-POWERED’ project (Mobile Connections to Promote Women's Economic Development) is a product of TATA Communications’ vision to empower 25,000 women with access to information - part of a greater vision to ultimately reach 100 million women across the globe. PROJECT GOAL: The M-Powered project aims to make significant and replicable contributions towards the eradication of extreme poverty by providing extremely poor women with appropriate mobile technologies in order to improve their access to critical information and services, subsequently enhancing their livelihoods. In addition, the data generated by the program aims to enable large-scale governmental anti-poverty programs to be more efficient, effective, and responsive to the needs of these women and their households. This two-way information flow therefore serves as an accountability structure for some of India’s poorest women. Objective 1: Increase 1,000 extremely poor households’ access to information that will enable greater financial and social inclusion and sustainable livelihood development (with grant support to a total of 1,700 participants).   Objective 2: Increase the responsiveness and accountability of governments and providers to the needs of extremely poor households by increasing their access to real-time data about these needs and strengthening households’ ability to provide input and feedback about services provided. 

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• India
• United States of America

• Women
• Indigenous and nomadic peoples
• Remote and rural communities

Yes, replication and scaling is currently underway.

While M-Powered seeks to use mobile technology to increase women’s access to information on topics ranging from agricultural best practices to pension schemes, what makes the project innovative are its prevailing themes of community solidarity and self-reliance and its targeting of indigenous and mostly illiterate women.

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