IBM to help NGO manage database

When it was registered as a trade union to help women from the lower economic strata in the early 1970s, no one accounted for the rush of popularity among women to join the Ahmedabad-based Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) decade after decade. With a task of managing member details of over a million women from across Gujarat, the association has now got help in the form of IBM, the international IT major.

As part of its Corporate Service Corps (CSC) programme in India, IBM had tied up with 11 NGOs and not-for-profit government organisations to bring 40 IBM professionals from 19 different countries to India to work on critical projects for these partner organisations. Mumbai and Ahmedabad were selected as the first destinations in India when the country was announced as a host for the CSC programme. SEWA was one such partner in Ahmedabad.

With SEWA, IBM will develop a strategy to help connect its members on a regular basis for their day-to-day needs. The IT major is also helping develop a user-friendly application that can capture, maintain and monitor member information.

“We worked with them on managing their member system since they have around one million members and get nearly 15-20 per cent additions on that every year. We are also working with them on using voice-based web for their information needs,” said an IBM employee who worked with SEWA.

For SEWA, the project has brought some respite from incessant queries from its million plus members. “A lot of day-to-day co-ordination and information assimilation takes place at the organisation. Most of our members are illiterate and hence unable to access information on their own. With IBM establishing a server for us, we are able to answer our members’ queries through a voice-based web portal. In this, our members are required to call on a toll-free number and speak certain key words to avail information and SEWA’s personnel will find it for them from the portal and revert back,” said a source at SEWA.

The ‘Spoken Web’ project presently being piloted by the IBM Research-India team aims to transform how people create, build and interact with e-commerce sites on the world wide web using the spoken word instead of the written word. The Spoken Web is based on the concept of a VoiceSite. People can simply create and browse VoiceSites and even conduct business transactions, simply by talking over the existing telephone network.

IBM has said it will support SEWA in computerising payment processes with Payment Gateways system, Biometrics Devices, Hand-held devices etc., It is also working on developing a multiple marketing strategy for SEWA’s ‘RUDI Ben’ programme.

The company has announced that in 2010, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune will play host to CSC initiatives.