Google India launches campaign to focus on educating women online

Google India along with the partnership with Intel, HUL and Axis Bank has launched a 'Digital Literacy' initiative campaign called 'Helping Women Get Online' (HWGO) program. It aims at helping 50 million Indian women to get online in one year.

Based on the research conducted by various organisations, it is revealed that 'Internet' can help women to overcome many challenges they are facing today. Moreover, it can help them achieve self-esteem, express their views freely, open up new opportunities and help them to gain education.

The study says that, the digital literacy can benefit women in may ways, such as translating into lowering maternal and infant mortality rates, uplifting the GDP of the country and also improving their standard of living and status in the society.

This campaign created awareness about,

• The benefits of Internet for women,
• To educate women to use the Internet to improve their lives,
• To improve their work with partners,
• To enable easy Internet access for women across the country.

In order to make the campaign more effective, Google India's first stage of the initiative is to launch a mass media campaign targeted at women and promote the specially designed website www.hwgo.com, which will host content covering the basic Internet and special content that is relevant for women in India. The website is available in Hindi and English languages.

In additional to this, women will also be able to call a toll-free helpline number 1800-41+999-77 to get answers for any queries that they may have about the Internet.

Yonca Brunini - Global lead, Tech For Good and VP, Marketing Google said, "I am delighted to share the success of a pilot program that was carried out by us at a village in Bhilwara, Rajasthan. With this project, we successfully completed a digital literacy effort of training over 100,000 women in Bhilwara on how to use the basic applications on the Internet. The learnings from the pilot will help us to work on a framework which we will use to roll out in other parts of India."

Debjani Ghosh, Managing Director- Sales and Marketing group, Intel South Asia says, "We are extremely encouraged by the findings of the first phase of the program where we saw over 52 percent women participants, and it was heartening to see them use the newly acquired knowledge and skills to better support their families. Given the size and diversity of our country, we as an industry, need to do a lot more and hence we feel Google's HWGO program will help them use technology for a better life."