ICT significance for Community Engagement during COVID in Rural India: An application suite
Aswathi Padmavilochanan, Amritha Natarajan, Lekha Shekhar, Srividya Sheshadri, A Parameswari, Bhavani Rao R · 2023
The effectiveness of Community Engagement programs such as Women’s Empowerment Projects (WEP) relies heavily on efficient communication, allocation of resources, and reporting. Despite having a functional operational model, the COVID-19 situation exacerbated the challenges faced by these projects in terms of communication and monitoring. To address this, we propose an ICT-based operational model that incorporates a specially developed field operations tracker application, WE-FOT. This application digitizes information gathering, monitoring, and reporting processes, resulting in a centralized repository and data portal for improved centralized reporting. This paper presents the architectural design, functional features, and effectiveness of the toolset in the specific context of WEP implementation across the rural communities of India.