Social Mobility among women is a real problem. Women around the world suffer from this problem, more often than not, in a professional setting. Corporations and employers require skill standardizations and need accredited claims to support for their decision to provide employment to people. This is the norm. But, women without access to livelihood opportunities are left out in this case. There is no room to communicate expertise in fields, as they do not have a credible proof of work. In this case, women resort to informal business/career setups from home, or in the worst case, kill their dreams!
This is something we do not want to happen. Women can bring change and transformation at an astronomical level, and the world would be an unfortunate place if we loose to that.
Even so, women employment and entrepreneurship space is still underdeveloped. What are the reasons for that? Women still work alone, even in developed countries. Bandwidth, time, and navigability for their business setups are very restricted. All this contributes to limited headroom for growth. One important observation that our team made is that most women have a core skillset around which they try to build businesses.
Ishvari is a platform for women to call their own. It acts as the technical and marketing bridge for the aspiring women entrepreneurs and also as a place for women to establish credibility and brand to secure employment.
We built the application using the MERN stack. Our initial iteration focuses on the social aspect and the community development aspect of the women employment and entrepreneurship space. For this we built a social media like app with e-commerce built in. Women can post about the skills they learn and educate the whole community with their content. In addition to monetizing on the content posted, women can sell the artwork, courses, or things that they make by learning from the content posted.
The biggest challenge that we ran into was deciding on what to work on. We were aware of the problem at hand, but finding a rightful solution took the most time. We navigated browsed through many platforms that tried to achieve some or the other aspect of this problem but nothing to the full. Arriving on this idea was a boon for us since we couldn't find a platform that has been built to cater to this segment of the market.
Technical challenges are something that a team always faces in a hackathon. And our team was no different. Perhaps the biggest of all was fixing the setup of Cloudinary API in order to store and load content on the web. The particular nuance of the problem was the intermingling of Cloudinary API with the socket server we were using. Alas, it was fixed.
We are proud of the fact that we have an MVP built which works very well on the social aspect of things. Several features like posting, blogging, search, and messaging work well in our implementation. Due to time constraints and school commitments, we were able to only limitedly implement the e-commerce vertical for the users and the marketplace.
One important thing that we learnt was that women globally need a voice to express themselves. Most of them fall back due to complex social constructs especially in the developing countries and due to lack of opportunities. We truly were amazed when we saw women online who challenged the system and became successful in what they do. We salute them! In addition, we think that encouraging women to do what they love and providing that little support and confidence can take us way ahead from where we are. Because women are the ones who created us, and it is the least we can do to give back to them.
Ishvari will focus on perfecting the marketplace segment of things to cater for better monetization features and also work on community building aspect. An example of this would be to have a private members only access to certain content posted on the website. In addition, Ishvari plans on expanding to other segments like creative spaces, health and wellness, hobby sharing categories and much more! This way, Ishvari will be able to boost women engagement and employment across all verticals. One important change that we want to bring is the setup of micro-financing services for women who want to raise money for their ventures and create a brand. Our platform will be key in providing credible data about the creator and accomplishments so that women become self-reliant, strong, and make wonders!
Note : This repository contains the submission for Hack For Good 2022 hosted by DSC Student Developers' Group NUS.
With love, Team Buffering...