Enhancing the Rural Self Help Group -- Bank Linkage Program

Empowerment of Self Help Groups (SHGs) is a dominating aspect as the micro-finance industry ushers into an era of maturity. Today SHGs are widely recognized as the hubs for information dissemination within villages and entry points for financial institutions as well as consumer goods organizations, though less has been done to deal with this highly illiterate population in terms of upgrading their skill sets or making them competent enough to soak the deluge of knowledge intensive programs aligned for them. In this paper, we observe that mobile penetration, the ease with which rural population uses the voice interface, and acceptability of mobile related technologies, all bring us to the confluence of mobility and innovative interaction technologies that can help in designing a system for the next billion population. We propose a system that uses voice as a medium to percolate knowledge through the thick layers of illiteracy, thereby serving as an effective mechanism to bring about a paradigm shift in the way SHGs are formed, operate and interact with the Micro-finance Institution (MFI). This system enables low cost financial services to be comprehended and adopted by the SHGs while empowering them to raise concerns and undertake active participation. This kind of empowerment of SHGs is unseen till date and can lead to, especially in case of women, better representation in elections of local panchayats, dowry upliftment and other social advancements, not understating the success of MFIs. Our system is designed and realized using IBM's Spoken Web technology that employs an easy-to-use voice interface to create dynamic content in local vernacular language, based on the concept of 'Voice Sites', interconnected by 'Voice Links'.