Edition 130: Storytelling is relational
It places storytellers in a relationship with a community of listeners
Hi. It’s Anjali. If you don’t remember who I am after all this time, I don’t blame you - but you signed up to this newsletter to read about interesting non-Global North news in the creative and tech industries. I’m a Director at Storythings. Thanks for being here.
Links
One of my favourite projects from 2022: Toolkit for Counterparts is an interdisciplinary cross-country collaboration between artists from the Philippines and the UK. They look at disability justice and disinformation, amongst other issues, in the form of games, videos, maps and archives.
Late in 2021, I was part of an online workshop held by Data & Society looking at storytelling about AI from the Global South. The output from that workshop was published in December 2022, curated and edited by Ranjit Singh, Rigoberto Lara Guzmán, and Patrick Davison. I encourage you to give it a read - I worked with Vasundhra Dahiya from IIT Jodhpur in India on developing her story, but all the pieces are very thought-provoking, as is the whole book: Parables of AI In/From The Global South: An Anthology. Also, if you’d like to dig deeper, there are some fantastic resources in A Primer on AI in/from the Majority World, a useful accompaniment to the anthology.
An exciting new podcast is out. Bad Money: Big Spender is the story of gangster Cheung Tze-keung, Hong Kong’s most notorious gangster, that also introduces us to some of the very first geopolitical issues between China and Hong Kong. Big Spender started out with prison breaks and scams but finally committed a crime so big that China noticed.
EY have opened an Asia-Pacific Innovation Lab in Shenzhen, China focussing on rapid prototyping and product development.
Inside the world’s biggest tech bazaars - a collection of essays and photos from Hong Kong, Jakarta, Lagos, Bengaluru, São Paulo, Taipei, Tokyo, and Mexico City.
View a gorgeous collection of art from Africa in Colours of Africa, an online exhibition curated by Design Indaba for Google Arts & Culture. Take the time to explore the wheel by colour - it’s fascinating.
Manchester City Football Club has entered into a partnership with Reliance Jio in India, through which fans in the country will be able to access multiple experiences through their digital platforms. Interesting, shall we say - and probably the first of many such sports partnerships with Jio.
Opportunities
The Mozilla Foundation is seeking a Content Creator for their Privacy Not Included initiative (remote with a preference for UK, US, Germany, Canada).
Stears Business is looking for a Technical Recruiter (remote/Nigeria).
Brink are looking for Innovation Executives and Innovation Managers (remote/worldwide).
From the community
Agustin Cruz in Santiago, Chile, is building an open-source 3D metal and ceramic printer so that it becomes affordable for small institutions, hospitals and makers across the world, particularly in emerging and low-income countries. He’s running this project on his own - you can learn more and support him via Patreon.
PLUG: Storythings has just started to release the results of a research project on how people’s attention and media behaviours are changing since the advent of the pandemic. Scroll Stoppers: Six Ways Hybrid Working Is Changing Our Attention will be released in parts via a regular newsletter, Attention Matters - watch out for further media-related research there in future.
3 Questions With…Divya Kamerkar
Divya Kamerkar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pinky Promise, a start-up that provides instant and high quality reproductive healthcare for every woman. Divya has a decade of experience in gender and healthcare. During her time as a Senior Consultant for the Delhi Government's Commission for Women, Divya worked on expanding access to women's health and wellbeing, combatting human trafficking, and reforms to the judicial and police system to make Delhi better for women. Divya also worked for the Bridgespan Group where she helped several governments, philanthropists and non-profits achieve greater strategic clarity and increase their impact in nutrition, healthcare and early childhood development. Divya has a B.S in Biology from Yale University, is one of Yale's Global Health Fellows, and holds an MBA from Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania. She is also a published author in medical and scientific journals. In her free time, Divya enjoys going on long runs, scuba diving and hiking.
Pinky Promise wants to make healthcare in India judgement-free and accessible through your app. Tell us a bit about your journey - what made you realise there was a market for what you wanted to do - traditionally gynaecologists in India and good old Google have probably been the solution for most people!
Pinky Promise provides instant and high quality healthcare to women, using our proprietary technology. Traditional gynaecologists in India are actually inaccessible to most women who need their care and googling symptoms seems to cause more panic than good, according to what we have seen from surveys of women.
Women in India face both physical as well as social barriers when it comes to their gynaecological care. In India, according to the National Family Health Survey, there are 360 million women of reproductive age. Only about 8% of these women live in the big cities of India (Census 2011). As the same time, according to the FOGSI, which is India’s federation for gynaecologists, there are around 70,000 gynaecologists practicing in India. But almost 80% of these gynaecologists are concentrated in the big cities of India because they want to be close to the affluent clients and multi-speciality hospitals. As a result, more than 80% women who need reproductive healthcare are cut off from it. Additionally, it is not usual practice in India for people to freely discuss issues pertaining to their menstrual cycles, vaginal discharge and so on - even with one’s own mother! As a result, when women do have a reproductive health issue, they hesitate to take a decision about solving it. Also, since premarital sex is a big taboo in India, they are scared to seek gynaecological care for fear that someone known to them may find out about their sexual lives.
I woke up to this reality during my first ever job out of college in the state of Bihar. I was in a town called Muzaffarpur which has some medical facilities and is rapidly growing into a large urban locality. Here, a 20-year old woman, Pooja (name changed) was unable to seek timely care for a case of abnormal uterine bleeding (her periods were carrying on for more than 10 days) since there was no female doctor in the entire area and she had hesitated to mention this to the one female doctor who used to visit the area’s hospital once a week. She had to be rushed to the state capital, Patna, and her family had to incur heavy hospitalisation charges for something that could technically be stopped with one pill. Pooja was on Instagram and Facebook through a low cost smartphone.
As a result of these barriers - both physical and social - in order to find answers, we realised that women were just googling their symptoms. In fact, we found that in any given month in India, in English alone, reproductive health keywords are searched nearly 100 million times. This has been made possible by the very low costs of 4G internet as well as by the penetration of cheap smartphones in the Indian market.
However, “good old Google” does not solve these issues. This is because of the overwhelming amount of differing and technical information that exists on Google. There is a huge risk of incorrect self medication, a risk of a lot of panic being created, and of incomplete and incorrect information being passed on to women. In fact on our app, we have been able to help women who have incorrectly self-medicated for yeast infections and made it worse, or who kept drinking cranberry juice to cure a UTI and it got worse and so on.
At Pinky Promise, our app has a free symptom checker built by a gynaecologist (and advised by several leading gynaecologists in India) which uses evidence-based medical protocols to help women make sense of their symptoms. They can then choose to consult instantly with a gynaecologist for just Rs 50 (0.8 cents). Our software assists gynaecologists who use a dashboard built by us, to consider a wide range of applicable information, evaluate it against standard medical protocols, and diagnose precisely and accurately. We have chatrooms where women can anonymously ask and get support from the community, and a period tracker where women can continue to stay proactive about their health. We have therefore built a holistic platform for women with the ability to help us eventually predict and cure issues better.
Tell us a couple of impact stories that make you proud of what you do. What has happened only because of Pinky Promise and might not have happened otherwise?
Just last week, we had a person come to us from the state of Jammu & Kashmir, with a yeast infection. She found out about us on Instagram and after a consultation, realised that her symptoms were quite easily curable. She wrote to us telling us that there was no gynaecologist in her town and she had been spending several sleepless and difficult nights due to the panic she had felt after searching for her symptoms on the internet. She said that were it not for us, she would have engaged in several home remedies and worked herself up into a frenzy!
Komal (name changed) from Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, was unable to find the right birth control methods that suited her. She already had two kids and was not mentally or physically capable of supporting another. Negotiating condom use with her husband had proven difficult. On our app, she was able to identify that birth control pills may be a good and discreet option for her. Due to a history of heavy and painful periods, the Copper-T may not have been suitable and she didn’t live close to a gynaecologist who could insert the IUS (Mirena coil). Komal called us a month later telling us that she no longer suffers for days on end with heavy periods, and she is no longer burdened by not having her birth control plan figured out!
What book is on your bedside table (or Kindle etc.) right now?
I am reading The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.
The title of this newsletter
…is an excerpt from the description of Parables of AI.
Endnote
That’s it for today. If you’d like to let me know about interesting news or companies from the Global South that should be featured here, let me know by replying to this email or fill in this form. And do ask friends to subscribe or share this post. You can also find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Till next time,
Anjali