I like the idea of moving through life by making. So, I draw, I build, and I’ve also been attempting to write. It all comes from what I’ve lived, the people I know, and the ones I’ll meet along the way.  
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CV


01

A tool to capture household expenditure priorities and preferences for social protection.
Consultancy
Tool Design + Information Design
2024-2025

In 2024, I worked as a consultant with a non-profit organisation in Bangalore to develop a suite of five tools to explore the policy and systemic factors that impact the well-being of women working in public spaces, primarily informal & formal waste-pickers, street vendors, and sex workers.

I primarily contributed to three of these tools: a data collection tool to understand the infrastructure needs of women working in public spaces, a tool to foster community dialogue around shared risks, and a tool to collect household expenditure priorities and preferences for social protection measures. The suite also included a participatory community walk and legal awareness materials.


Initial concept tests were conducted internally and with community representatives


Communities often become vulnerable due to poverty, occupation, geography, and climate change. Each household employs different coping strategies based on its priorities and access to resilience mechanisms. Currently, the design of social protection schemes doesn’t account for people’s priorities or changing needs during unforeseen events, such as health emergencies and market shifts. While conventional surveys and focus group discussions capture how people react to past events, they fail to capture insights into people’s priorities in future hypothetical events. Addressing these gaps can strengthen the design of social protection measures to help address specific vulnerabilities and greater uptake.  

Representation of the tool setup


Before the participants interact with the tool, a short survey on their current household priorities is collected. The tool then takes place in a fictional orchard that simulates real-life household expenditures and resilience. Each participant is tasked to manage the well-being of an orchard by allocating a limited income across different expenditure categories. Each round introduces challenges that reflect real-life experiences, such as rising material costs and unexpected events. Eventually, social protection measures such as formal and informal loans, cash transfers, insurance, and skill development schemes are introduced to participants. The choices made in the tool are tracked through different parameters, and over multiple rounds, they experience trade-offs of financial planning under uncertainty.

A debrief is then conducted by the facilitator, helping participants reflect on how their priorities and strategies shift under different circumstances, and, using the initial survey, they see how their financial planning decisions changed.

The initial interviews and secondary research provided insights into current income and expenditure patterns across communities. The conceptual modelling of the tool broadly deployed preventative (e.g., income support), protective (e.g., savings, insurance), and promotive (e.g., skill development schemes) measures of social protection. It examines how expenditure choices affect outcomes across health, finance, education and income. We explored multiple iterations of the tool, ranging from an abstract form to a realistic version. We tried to make the information within the tool accessible to people with different literacy levels. 


Tests with community members


The tool is integrated into community programmes, and the data collected on household expenditure priorities and preferences in resilience methods helps civil society organisations plan interventions and advocacy.
Acknowledgements: Srinidhi, Sukanya, Nico, Anirudh, Yashwin, Pragati, Pranay, Karthik, Akhilesh, Bharat and Sruthi for all their advice; all the informal workers and community leaders who attended the sessions; and other civil society organisation partners.