Skill Nari | Dum Hain Toh Hum Hain

Published in

Design and Innovation at ISDI

9 min readJul 5, 2020

The journey of overworked-breadwinning-underpaid women from pocha to balance sheets

Dhobighat, Mahalaxmi Mumbai, The setting for much of our research.

Nine billionaires in India, today, own as much as the bottom 50%[1]. With tech and automation at the helm of change, this economic divide is only going to exacerbate. Be it COVID-19, demonetisation or the predicted occurrence of automation, any big change needs an adaptive strategy that enables smooth transition into safe futures. But what of the unskilled, semi skilled and skilled worker class? The meek, the dutiful and the decent amongst us seem to be stuck, some like an ignorant hamster on a wheel and others painfully aware of the misfortune of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

When it comes to the empowerment of the working class everyone including workers prefer believing they aren’t suffering under our noses. A team of designers set out to observe and understand the marginalised low income working class’s home, work and internal environment.

Guiding Star

Before jumping into studying ethnographic environments of urban poor, it was important to frame a research anchor & outline assumptions based on domain knowledge. [2] What is known is that urban poor live in cramped up areas with lack of sanitation, healthcare and basic amenities. While these are surface level problems that most designers have been smitten by in the past, the team was looking for a fresh perspective.

Victims of capitalistic greed, urban poor are generalised as sufferers of economic hierarchies. This is a well-established fact. But what is a lesser-known truth is that women bear most of the economic burden, living foot-to-mouth along with bearing many children. This was highlighted in a study conducted in 2020 where a farm laborer, Bucchu Devi confessed to having “no time to even die” in her routine. [3]

After a hard day of work, she gets 3 hours of sleep with remainder 21 hours going into managing hectic work, household chores and tantrums of three children. Intrigued by the level of suffering of these women, internally we decided to call them OWW (over-worked women). We picked up themes — household management stress, lack of sleep and work-life imbalance as the main probe areas of field research. We placed some filters for the OWW persona to be interviewed as following:

ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY

After amply studying OWW’s environment & living conditions, it was clear that they were management gurus in their own right, always on top of jugaads (life hacks). 55% of urban poor residents live in houses less than 10 metre square, which is typically the size of a single apartment room. While compact living seemed to be a sore point for OWW, they had perfectly calibrated their house to their survival capacities.

A TURNING POINT

In one of the team’s visits to a family living in the outskirts of Parel station, we made an outlandish observation which became the basis of our empathy probe. By now, we had collected some common insights like — most husbands of OWW were out-of-work, some kids of this community were school dropouts & there were a lot of domestic abuse stories attached to lives of OWW. Work had become one of their strongest motivators to live and provide for.

There was an apparent lack of knowledge on how to connect with businesses & promote their diverse portfolio of skills. The next step was to understand their learning mindsets, remember we were still focusing on the female workforce of this community. The next step was a well calibrated design probe. This is what we did:

This ice-breaker activity was so powerful that we found many quirky insights around their learning mindset, habits and patterns

OWW are second generation learners, they can’t do textbook learning due to handling many jobs. They perceive the education of their kids as the only escape from their miserable living conditions. Their learning has to be conversational and would like it to be a fun social activity
OWW has a gradual learning curve due to lack of self-esteem & awareness of their own talents. They need small perceived wins to persevere in their journey to excel. They don’t see merit in strides for long term goals.
OWW don’t get opportunities for self-care & thanks to oppressive policies of their workspaces have lost the power to fight for basic rights. They verbalise monetary needs but suppress certain unmet needs like recreation and sleep & hence remain conflicted about both.

A refined problem statement was curated: How might we make upskilling relevant, engaging and tuned to the learning curve of over-worked low income women so that they are equipped to improve their monetary prospects?

Defining the constraints of the solution, we focused on three key parts of the ‘how might we’ to further research on — The main part was ‘relevant & engaging upskilling programs’. It was important to look into global and India’s skilling trends & already leveraged areas of solutioning. The other important aspect was to figure out ‘enhancing mental tasks’, all soft skills that would enable them to integrate with entrepreneurial networks. Last but not the least, the ‘learning curve’ of OWW which we had gauged through our design experiment.

The team collectively came to a consensus that any innovation proposed in this sphere would be done with the long term goal of ‘enhancing female entrepreneurship’ in this community.

RE, UP AND OUT SKILLING

We studied the recent BCG report on ‘Future of Upskilling’ and figured out some pivot points for our solution framework. [4]

On-the-job learning, self-study & conference & seminars would be highly preferred ways of skilling. (Note: India still uses the traditional route to skilling through NGOs tied up with some private entities)

Important skills of the future would be — communication, leadership and analytics in decreasing order of value.

The demand for skilling is more in age group of 25–40 with those having following backgrounds — no formal education, secondary & high school education.

We also studied NGOs and private centres in Mumbai. It was clear that no holistic long term skilling program was present. Most organisations had focus areas like reproductive rights, women empowerment, entrepreneurship training etc. But none with a complete assistance package for skilling or personalised learning. So, with those parameters set, we began re-imagining the entire skilling system for OWW.

Having had set a pole star of — enhancing OWW’s mental capabilities to the level of an entrepreneur, the team knew the ‘why’ (via research). All we had to figure out was how? After 10 days of studying skilling systems and speaking to OWW back and forth, the team decided to refurbish the skilling system to give it a more integrated & realistic vision for India. From that emerged ‘Skill Nari’

This is a social enterprise/system that has a front end business with OWW and provides a continuous backend skilling program. Through the front end, an extra job is provided to OWW as a bait to earn more money. The strategy is to lure them & then engage with our training programs once trust builds. The skill training spans across 36 months to accommodate the learning curve of OWW and banks on wealth generation for them to keep them motivated to upskill.

Here’s a look at the redesigned system that would enable rise of female entrepreneurship in this community:

THE SKILL NARY SYSTEMIC ENTERPRISE

Skill Nari’s backend skilling program can be explained in 10 stages with the metaphorical imagery of a transformative journey where a person travels from a desert and finally reaches the oasis for water. The backend is where the actual magic would happen:-

THE DESERT | This is the stage before the trainees are enrolled. OWW iS getting a heightened sense of her miserable survival routine. She feels hopeless.

THE CRUEL DESERT | Her routine is packed & is now going through a mental & physical breakdown. This pain is triggering her to seek external help.

HOPE | Tired of her everyday struggles with kids and husband, she seeks solace in friends, relatives or NGOs who nudge her to approach Skill Nari.

THE MIRAGE | In this acquisition phase, Skill Nari provides counselling, mentoring & engages them into an industry level job that pays them. This is the Training Program 01, where Nari is trying to achieve her immediate goals.

The system map includes our industry partners who are engaged with the frontend. Our trainees would form a part of their supply chain.

THE CARROT | Six months into soft skills training & industry job, Nari is eligible for an appraisal within the front end, which will act as motivation to attend Training Program 02.

The system map now includes a local university. Curriculum, certification and credibility for the training is provided by tying up with local universities.

THE STARTER | After having understood Nari’s skill potential, she gets to choose the main skill upgrade she wants to opt for. For example a restaurant chef.

THE SECOND CARROT | After 12 months of rigorous studies, she is promoted to a managerial role or is eligible for an internship to explore and experiment with her abilities. This is where she can opt for Training Program 03.

THE FULL COURSE MEAL | In the third training module, she is taught how to convert her domain skills to businesses in her field of expertise. This goes on for 18 months.

The system map connects the backend & frontend with completion of basic trust building between Naris and the enterprise.

THE PODIUM | Outstanding Naris during this last mile of the program get a chance to be a part of an OTT documentary, being mentored by one of the best entrepreneurial minds in the country to enhance their business & reach. This podium provides recognition & respect to hardworking trainees.

Transactions between the backend & OTT channels.

THE OASIS | This is the final stage of engagement where Naris are independently either adding value to self or other businesses. They are connected to an entrepreneurial grid that constantly gives them jobs.

WHATS NEXT?

The vision going ahead for SKILL NARI would be to select and train out our first set of 80 facilitators and develop service & business relations with industries that would enable our front end enterprise model. Post this, we will collaborate with several NGOs to acquire our first set of Naris, the 480 women (first batch) who have the fire in their belly to change to turn their pain into their biggest weapon ever.

We leave you with visuals of our soft skills guide for Naris, which is currently in extensive testing.