EMPOWERED

Inspiration

A website to empower women self-help groups and women NGOs, by creating job opportunities for them, launching the products made by them along with providing workshops via volunteers. EMPOWER came into action!

What it does

Our project aims to help empower women who do not have conventional/formal education, are housewives that are completely dependent on their significant other, or belong to the economically deprived classes. As per our observation, these products are sold at physical stalls (locally made achar, chutney, jewelry, handicrafts) or at nearby supermarkets. The reach is not huge, and it will continue to have a small reach in the post-pandemic world, where everything is going online. Another observation we made is, all the job/hiring sites focus a lot on academic skills and create opportunities for them, often ignoring those who don’t have an educational background.

How we built it

Our project will create a platform (website) for individual women or SHGs who want to sell their products, women who are looking for non-academic jobs (e.g. menial labor), and NGOs that are working on the same problem. The reason for involving NGOs is that not every one of these women has technological knowledge or are literate. The NGOs that take part in this, will help them handle the technological aspect, which might be the initiative of the NGO in the first place. The platform connects those who seek jobs (e.g. as a maid, cleaner, cook, babysitter) with those who are in need of such workers. A similar feature helps SHGs who are selling products take custom orders or mass orders. The platform will also enable volunteers to work on-site (through NGOs or otherwise) with the SHGs and teach them skills or spread awareness about rights women have (e.g. How to handle a bank account).

Challenges we ran into

Filtering Hire Profile Cards by writing custom functions - Due to unfamiliarity with react hooks and redux, filtering functions were not working. Overcame the problem by reading documentation and googling errors. Making the site multilingual (adding regional languages) so as to increase accessibility to the Indian Rural Population - By watching videos on the functioning of React Hooks, we could integrate one regional language (Malayalam) translation into the Home Page. We had to refer to a lot of videos and documentation to make the website look and function the way we wanted and to deploy it. Also, we wanted to make the website responsive as not everyone has a desktop to view the website, but we could integrate responsive design in a few features, not all.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Implementing all the skills we've learned in this lockdown with correct work and also completing the project on time.

What we learned

Apart from all the technical aspects, we learned the most important thing that is time management.

What's next for EMPOWERED

We are updating the website with various language for better communication. Also, to add a GPS to track the address where help is needed.

Built With

• css3
• express.js
• mongodb
• node.js
• react
• react-hooks
• react-router