Rapid urbanisation, rising inequalities and the resulting lack of access to basic infrastructure in the South Asian context have adversely impacted women working in public spaces. They are often not considered legitimate users of public spaces, making them an easy target for exploitation, discrimination, and gender-based violence. Solidarity between women from diverse backgrounds and occupations can help counter this hostility experienced in public spaces. This project aims to understand the experiences of women who work in public spaces in urban areas, particularly on streets, and design a game-based toolkit grounded in this understanding. Four occupation groups – street vendors, sex workers, formal sanitation workers, and informal waste pickers were chosen as the communities of interest for this project. Currently, Bengaluru and Mumbai are the two cities where data on the experiences of informal women workers have been collected with the help and inputs from grassroots organisations. The emerging toolkit will be adapted to suit the needs of other community groups in various regions.
The toolkit will be used to foster opportunities and platforms for women across occupations (four in the case of this project) to come together, articulate their needs, understand each other’s experiences, and to recognise and build networks for long-term knowledge sharing and cooperation within the public space. It also aims to enhance the awareness and understanding of laws and policies and build vital pathways to access entitlements and public services. The larger objective is to enable long-term engagement across and within communities of informal women workers, which could result in solidarity building.
The toolkit comprises serious games which entertain while also providing the foundation for
- immersive and experiential learning
- identifying challenges, and
- articulating stakeholder needs and requirements.
