Girls Code in India to Tackle Challenges of Slum Living

Adolescent girls in the Mumbai slum of Dharavi are battling the daily challenges they face, one mobile app at a time. Tutored on laptops donated by friends of Nawneet Ranjan, a filmmaker who set up a charity in Dharavi, the girls are embracing technology to confront issues ranging from their safety to garbage in the sprawling slum in India's biggest city. "Girls and women suffer the most in a slum, as they often have no resources and are not aware of their rights," said Ranjan, who studied filmmaking in the United States before returning to Mumbai.

Photo- Dharavi Diary/Facebook"I wanted to teach the girls how to use technology to get ahead," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a bare room that serves as the classroom. About two dozen girls were seated on the floor, tapping at laptops or reading. The girls are building apps they hope will be used by slum dwellers to make their lives easier - by allowing them to send a distress call if a woman is being harassed, a message to civic authorities when garbage needs clearing, or to receive an alert when it's their turn at the communal water tap.

India is one of the world's largest software services exporters. Global and local technology companies hire tens of thousands of English-speaking college graduates every year at modern campuses in cities such as Bengaluru and Hyderabad.
The spare room in Dharavi where Roshani, Ansuja, Sapna and Nahek learned to code is a far cry from those glass-and-chrome offices and from global movements such as Girls Who Code and Girls in Tech, aimed at getting more women into technology...