Humanitarian opportunities in the network age: Empowering disadvantaged communities

This research focuses on using technology to empower people at the bottom of the pyramid; how can they benefit from being online? And how can humanitarian technology address the challenges they face? Therefore, two distinct cases are explained. The first is initiating an income generating activity for women living in urban slum in Nairobi, Kenya. Although the outcome is a primitive approach, it highlights the necessity of utilizing technology in applying sustainable approaches for empowerment. This achievement leads to the second case; describing the context, methods and results of an ongoing project, in regards to implementing a technological empowering approach for disadvantaged and marginalized women in Iran. The project consists of three stages (1) educating (2) social collaboration (3) support. During the second phase, public community is engaged in a creative collaboration online platform to empower disadvantaged women. Applying technology as a collaborative platform, establishes an effective communication among different walks of life, which promotes the marginalized women dignity further to supplement the economical empowerment. These experiments revealed that the only way for solving disadvantaged communities´ problems, is making its residents responsible for solving them. The emergence of technologies which make possible participatory systems at scale, paved the way for taking advantage of social networking and crowd wisdom. Hence, it is the right time to shift the humanitarian technology toward more holistic approaches. A connected marginalized community is more informed and has access to further resources which will facilitate and speed up the process of their sustainable and holistic empowerment.