The IT for Change Social Report

Reflecting on Our Organizational Growth

At 20 years and counting, we are fully seized of the imperative to avoid complacency and inculcate system-wide values that promote self-reflection and agile action. We are conscious that the pandemic has made our mission to promote a technological paradigm towards the highest standards of democracy, social equity, and human well-being ever more urgent.

To respond to this need, we have begun in earnest to build pan-organizational readiness, re-examining and tweaking our programing priorities as well as organizational practices. While we know that the equilibrium between internal maturity and external demands is always a work-in-progress, we are confident that we are on the right path.

The IT for Change Social Report

Reflecting on Our Organizational Growth

At 20 years and counting, we are fully seized of the imperative to avoid complacency and inculcate system-wide values that promote self-reflection and agile action. We are conscious that the pandemic has made our mission to promote a technological paradigm towards the highest standards of democracy, social equity, and human well-being ever more urgent.

To respond to this need, we have begun in earnest to build pan-organizational readiness, re-examining and tweaking our programing priorities as well as organizational practices. While we know that the equilibrium between internal maturity and external demands is always a work-in-progress, we are confident that we are on the right path.

Expanding organizational talent

 

  • We strengthened senior leadership in our technology, finance and accounting, and human resource and administration teams, and expanded staffing in these teams to meet the demands of our expanded project roster and large projects in particular
  • We expanded our communications team to build our strategic outreach and network support capacities
  • We continued to grow our team across various roles and expertise, with 24 new team members joining us in the year. We are now a 56-member strong community, with 62% of our team strength being female

Strengthening M&E protocols and organizational policies

  • To capture the impact of our work in more effective ways and with greater periodicity, we developed and institutionalized new systems to record various quantitative and qualitative metrics
  • We initiated a process of quarterly reporting to the organization board, covering pertinent finance and funding information as well as project milestones
  • In the past two years, we worked to strengthen our internal governance mechanisms and evolve policy responses for workplace harassment and irregular conduct, and whistleblower protection. This year we added to our organizational policies, a robust child protection and consent procedure that can better protect the rights and vulnerabilities of populations with whom we engage
  • We are undertaking an internal impact assessment of our field interventions to tackle gender-based violence. The study will assess outcomes in 25 participating villages to document the program’s impact and recommend key strategies for further work

Enabling professional development and team building

  • A workshop in November 2021 facilitated by feminist activist and trainer, Vani Periodi, helped the Prakriye team acquire a deeper understanding of how patriarchy impacts women’s choices and mobility.
  • Our education team convened monthly reading seminars on different issues in education and social change, including on aspects such as the role of caste and gender in education in order to build critical perspectives and deepen their multi-disciplinary understanding of education.
  • We convened trainings around gender sensitization and workplace sexual harassment, with a view to enhance internal understanding around our organizational Policy on Sexual Harassment (POSH) through trainings in English and Kannada for the team over March-April 2022.
  • Teams working on key research and advocacy projects in feminist digitality, the datafying state, and the digital economy undertook a retreat to connect, learn, and envision new tracks for further work.

Footprints

2021- 2022 VISIBILITY &
SOCIAL MEDIA FOOTPRINT

643.1k Twitter impressions
303% Instagram engagement spike
15.5k Bot Populi readership

2021- 2022 RESEARCH &
ADVOCACY FOOTPRINT

15+ research outputs produced
15+ policy briefs submitted
40+ media articles written
50+ events participated in

Notable citations

Media mentions

Our Work Out in the World

A defining contribution to the theorization of gender in the platform economy in the post-pandemic moment

— Call for contributions issued by the SAGE journal Gender and Development on Macro Frames of Microwork: A study of Indian women workers on AMT, authored by Anita Gurumurthy, Khawla Zainab, and Sadhana Sanjay.
A shorter version of this paper, written for the Economic and Political Weekly, was in SSRN’s Top Ten download list in 2021 for a number of queried topics including employment, labor law, value chains, women and labor markets.

Featured in Evgeny Morozov's The Syllabus as a hidden gem

— Report on Socializing Data value, synthesized from a roundtable with leading scholars on data governance in the field.

In a career spanning nearly two decades, this project was the best I have reviewed, and that too, despite the challenges of Covid-19!

— Appreciation from the evaluator for our project Centering Women in India’s Digitalizing Economy.

Approached by Indian digital rights organizations for collaborative data sharing towards a machine learning model for abusive speech in the Indian context

— A direct outcome of our research on misogynistic speech directed at Indian women in public-political life on Twitter.

IT for Change produces cutting-edge and ethics-driven research on data that few others are. At Ladysmith, we’ve been drawing on IT for Change’s recent work on Menstruapps, and their Feminist Digital Justice work more broadly, to inform how we design projects that use data to advance gender equality. I think it’s the best work out there on this topic.

—Tara Cookson, Canada Research Chair in Gender, Development, and Global Public Policy, University of British Columbia.

Our research study, Data subjects in the femtech matrix: A feminist political economy analysis of the global menstruapps market, was launched during the 16 days of activism week (Nov 25-Dec 10, 2021), and received over 3500 reads.