During the Pandemic, CD members and volunteers across the country worked with artisans to develop their digital presence through social media, images that tell their story, product catalogs that take them to
e-commerce platforms and more! While working on the digital presence together, the volunteers became a point of contact for our traditional artisans, and helped them navigate the new digital realms.
This gave birth to our Artisan Saathi Program –
A buddy (saathi) system in which artisans, new to using digital technology were paired with technologically adept volunteers, who first connected with the artisans online, got them comfortable with technology and then helped them enhance their digital capacity to build online identities for themselves and their practice.
In our first two Cohorts of the program, 20 Saathis worked closely with 55 artisans to create the digital presence. The saathis and the artisans discussed challenges, attend online photography and cataloging workshops together, experimented with phone photography for handmade products, wrote online bios for the artisans, built product catalogs and explored social media story-telling together!
This program helped us get deep insights into the reality on ground about access to technology and the easy of using it, and informed our training tools for digital capacity building.
