There will be an expected 480 million smartphone women users in India by 2030, and the time to start designing digital solutions for them is now. To help address women’s specific digital needs, Dalberg’s Mumbai office hosted ‘Smartphone Solutions that Work For Her’, a three-day lab that culminated in an open workshop in April 2019.

Over the course of the lab, Dalberg with Saarthi, Navana Tech and Armman applied the tools of human-centered design to develop holistic solutions for female smartphone users in rural India. After, in the one-day workshop, concepts aimed at strategically implementing and scaling smartphone-based solutions for this population were shared with representatives from the digital, social, and policy ecosystems.

This work was supported by the Ford Foundation and IWWAGE (Initiative for What Works to Advance Women and Girls in the Economy).

Learn more:

How can people working in the digital ecosystem use human-centered design to create and scale smartphone solutions for women? Our 2-minute video showcases the process we used to address women’s needs.

Which principles should be kept in mind when creating female-specific digital services and apps, and designing solutions aimed at helping smartphone usage to scale? 

Watch our animated video to see some starting points for narrowing the digital gender gap.

Here is the link to our design principles.