Myna Mahila Foundation
Myna Mahila Foundation is training their network of women “Rani Workers” in generative AI to power a text-based AI platform designed to dispel misconceptions around women’s health.
Submitted by:
Myna Mahila Foundation
Location:
India
About the Solution
With India’s female labor force participation at 23%, women in India remain disproportionately underrepresented. Despite educational achievements, they struggle to find employment that matches their qualifications. Barriers to digital literacy, access t technology, gender norms, and limited job opportunities exacerbate this workforce gap.
Myna targets these structural gaps by upskilling women from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and facilitating their entry into the workforce. Through this initiative, local women, known as “RANI” workers (which translates to “queen” in Hindi), are trained in generative AI to power a text-based AI platform designed to dispel misconceptions about women’s sexual and reproductive health. Given the sensitive nature of healthcare, Myna’s feedback loop process includes RANI workers’ community knowledge and empathetic responses backed by doctors and medical professionals to ensure that the AI-generated solutions accurately combat misconceptions.
Leading with Localism
This solution, crafted by and for women, is deeply rooted in an intimate understanding of the community’s norms, complexities, and needs. Myna’s approach brings a critical cultural context that enables the AI solution to navigate the stigmas in topics like sexual and reproductive health, providing unbiased and digestible information that is vetted by doctors. With localism at the core of the generative AI skilling and the AI user platform, the human feedback loop underscores the importance of firsthand knowledge of the community’s needs, resulting in continuous improvement, ongoing relevance, an empathetic approach, and accurate information. The local languages, dialects, and slang used in this AI platform not only provide easier community adoption but also innovate beyond English-centric large language model understanding.
Skilling That Scales:
Generative AI Skills Challenge Impact Report
The Myna Mahila Foundation developed an AI chatbot providing sexual health and family planning information in local languages and dialects and trained 227 workers in prompt engineering. There has been improved confidence and digital skills among women participants, while effectively addressing misinformation and sensitive health topics through AI-enabled anonymous responses.
Highlights
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AI in Action: Trained their AI model with data in multiple local languages and dialects, and generated 120,000 queries in Hindi, Hinglish, and Marathi on sexual and reproductive health, innovating large language models and breaking significant barriers for non-English-speaking communities.
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Maintained diversity across age, religion, education levels, and employment history in prompt engineer training cohorts.
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Accelerated socioeconomic mobility for women through training in data generation, speech transcription, chatbot testing, and data validation.
What’s Next?
Myna Mahila is pursuing additional funding paired with ongoing user feedback, which will fuel the expansion of the organization’s human-in-the-loop AI models, enhance the integration of human support into the chatbot system, and expand the AI-powered healthcare workforce project to an ecosystem model that supports women through multiple modalities. In the next year, Myna Mahila hopes to deepen support for women through telehealth services, local pharmacy connections, a broader network of doctors available 24/7, and more localization of medication information. Establishing partnerships with government bodies, public hospitals, and clinics will be crucial for expanding reach and integrating with existing health services.
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