suraksha

Goal: Our mission is to empower migrant women (especially in low resource regions) to have a community of people to reach out to and resources to access.

What we learned:

How to implement a text based network
State Management using SMS
Migrant women's needs
Existing Cultural Networks with India
Leveraging resources such as NGOs
Developing self sustainable models for a non-profit

How we built it: We used Twillio's API to enable text messaging and used node js as our server/business logic

Challenges we faced:

To make our product available in low connectivity settings - opted for the text based option
Making our revenue model self sustainable while being non-exploitative (i.e. not relying on too many external resources for funding) - partnered with local business and telecom companies while also hiring a full time grant writer to source grants
Safety for migrant women - partnered with existing NGOs to train and vet local women who could act as guides
Managing a large population on our platform and localizing matches between migrant and local women
Maintaining a simple/cohesive user flow while meeting the addressing the most significant use cases