At Myna Mahila, we harness AI and research
to develop scalable, data-backed solutions for
women's health and economic independence.
We study areas including:
Digital Health
Impact
Tech Adoption
Barriers
Microtasking
as Employment
AI-powered chatbot on
WhatsApp: Myna Bolo
Built with community-driven insights and rigorous testing, Myna Bolo operates via WhatsApp, allowing intuitive interaction through text, gifs, and voice inputs.
- Accessibility: Designed for local languages, literacy levels, and cultural relevance.
- Data Privacy: Ensures confidential access to health information.
- Medical Accuracy: Delivering verified, evidence-based advice.
Myna Bolo is trained with 170,734 real questions on sexual and reproductive health from women in the community.
FEATURED
AI-assisted Health
Workers: AIHW
- Scalable Training: Integrates AI-powered learning into Myna Mahila’s health worker network.
- Medical Oversight: Uses doctor-reviewed AI responses to ensure credibility and combat misinformation
- Localized Guidance: Empowers community health workers with AI-driven tools, for accessible, actionable information.
FEATURED
Future of Work for Women: Rani Upskilling and Work
Myna Mahila’s Rani Work model tackles systemic barriers—household responsibilities, mobility restrictions, and lack of flexible work—by leveraging AI and hyper-local solutions to create sustainable employment opportunities for women.
- LEARN: Digital literacy and AI training to equip women with in-demand skills.
- EARN: Home-based, AI-assisted tasks through the Rani app, enabling women to participate in data annotation, AI training, and digital work.
- CONNECT: Access to job counseling, peer networks, and professional development for long-term career mobility.
- 1,300+ women onboarded, earning INR 5,000–15,500 per month.
- 60 percent increase in household earnings, strengthening financial resilience.
- 30 percent transition into specialized roles, supported by tailored training, including AI-Assisted Job Counselor positions.
Ethical Approach with Rigorous Results
- Privacy First – We protect community data with strict security, anonymization, and responsible use.
- Fair Compensation – Women’s insights matter. We pay for their time and expertise, valuing them as active contributors.
- Informed Consent – Transparency at every step. No data is collected or used without clear, voluntary agreement.
- Bias-Aware AI – We design inclusive, community-driven models that reflect real experiences, not just numbers.
- Impact with Integrity – Our solutions are ethical, equitable, and built for lasting change.
Our research blends global expertise with a bottom-up, ethical approach that prioritizes the voices of the women we serve. We partner with institutions like Stanford University, MIT, Duke, and Emory, alongside funders such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Agency Fund, to deliver research that is both world-class and community-centered.
RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED TRIALS (RCTs)
flexible work opportunities, and community health support systems.
A key study, the Rani RCT, a 4 year project, which involved 4,000 women, revealed:
We have other ongoing research on the field.
PUBLISHED FINDINGS
At Myna Mahila, we believe in evidence-based impact, and our work is backed by rigorous research, evaluations, and expert analysis. Below, you’ll find our working papers, peer-reviewed publications, and reports that contribute to the global conversation on women’s healthcare, economic empowerment, and digital inclusion.
Current Research:
Working Papers
- What Works for Her?: How Remote Jobs from Home and Local Offices Affect Female Labor Force Participation in Urban India (with Lisa Ho) – Evaluating the impact of AI-assisted workforce models on women’s employment and agency.
- Women’s loss in urban slums: impact of covid-19 on livelihoods, health attitudes and behaviour(Sakshi Shah, Suhani Jalota) – Women’s loss in urban slums: impact of COVID-19 on livelihoods, health attitudes and behaviour
Publications
- “Kya family planning after marriage hoti hai?” ( Roshini Deva, Dhruv Ramani, Tanvi Divate, Suhani Jalota, Azra Ismail) – Exploring digital interventions for improving women’s health-seeking behaviors.
Reports & Commentaries
- Report on Women in the Workforce: Insights from Private Companies in India(Suhani Jalota, Katherine Xu and Tanvi Divate – Key insights on integrating women into the workforce and the role of private sector engagement.
- Women’s Agency in Mumbai Slums: Mitigating Biases (Priya Vishwanath) – Developing a tool to measure how labor market decisions affect women’s agency
- Dignity and Agency: Empowering Women in Urban Slums Through Meaningful Work (Priya Vishwanath) – Reflecting on how dignity of women is fundamentally tied to their agency.
Ethical Approach with Rigorous Results
At Myna Mahila, ethics are at the core of our research and innovation.
- Privacy First – We protect community data with strict security, anonymization, and responsible use.
- Fair Compensation – Women’s insights matter. We pay for their time and expertise, valuing them as active contributors.
- Informed Consent – Transparency at every step. No data is collected or used without clear, voluntary agreement.
- Bias-Aware AI – We design inclusive, community-driven models that reflect real experiences, not just numbers.
- Impact with Integrity – Our solutions are ethical, equitable, and built for lasting change.
Affiliated Researchers
name
Dr. Suhani Jalota
Hoover Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
In her research, Jalota uses field experiments to explore the intersection between women’s employment, health, and agency and how technology can amplify their self-determination. In her doctoral dissertation, she analyses constraints to women’s paid work and uses data from digital jobs performed at home in India to study the increase in female labor-force participation. For the last fourteen years, Jalota has been working in urban slum areas and rural communities on projects ranging from adolescent girl health, water, and sanitation to social protection policies in South Africa, Thailand, and several cities in India. Jalota was a Knight-Hennessy Scholar at Stanford University, where she received her PhD and MBA. She has a BS in economics and global health with the highest distinction from Duke University.
Dr. Suhani Jalota
name
Dr. Jasmin Moshfegh
Assistant Professor of Economics, Imperial College London
In addition to her research, Dr. Moshfegh has been involved in teaching health policy courses at Stanford and has contributed significantly to various academic and policy discussions. She has presented her work at numerous prestigious conferences, including the Academy Health Annual Research Meeting and the IHEA Economics of Genomics and Precision Medicine webinar. Before embarking on her academic career, Dr. Moshfegh worked as a private equity intern at GHO Capital Partners in London, UK, focusing on healthcare investments.
Dr. Moshfegh holds a dual MSc in Applied Economic Analysis from the Stockholm School of Economics (Sweden) and an MA in Quantitative Economics and Finance from the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland). Her career has been driven by a passion for understanding how public policy can improve healthcare systems and reduce disparities in health outcomes. She will be joining the business school at Imperial College London beginning September 2025.
Dr. Jasmin Moshfegh
name
Dr. Azra Ismail
Assistant Professor in Biomedical Informatics and Global Health, Emory University
In addition to her academic work, she is the co-founder of MakerGhat, an education nonprofit based in India, dedicated to nurturing the next generation of leaders and entrepreneurs from underserved communities. Dr. Ismail is currently building an interdisciplinary lab at Emory University and actively recruiting students with interests in human-computer interaction (HCI), computing or informatics, public health, and nursing. Her research approach combines ethnographic fieldwork, participatory design, system development, and evaluation, and is centered around building long-term relationships with communities, non-profits, and industry partners.
Her work has earned her recognition from Google Research, the ACM SIGCHI Dissertation Award, and Forbes 30 under 30 Asia. She has also been named to the lists of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics and 75 Women in STEAM by the Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India.
Dr. Ismail is passionate about discussing the intersection of technology and social impact, and she is committed to mentoring young researchers and supporting social entrepreneurs.
Dr. Azra Ismail
Assistant Professor in Biomedical Informatics and Global Health,
Emory University
name
Dr. Lisa Ho
Assistant Professor of Economics, Columbia University
Dr. Ho’s research focuses on development and labor economics, particularly in the areas of female labor force participation, digital work, and gender norms. She has conducted extensive fieldwork on the role of flexible, remote work in increasing labor force participation among women in developing countries. Her work has shed light on the ways in which norms of domesticity and job flexibility interact to influence women’s employment decisions.
Her notable research includes studies on flexible work arrangements as gateway jobs for women in West Bengal, the effect of work-from-home digital jobs on female labor force participation in Mumbai, and the impact of mobile internet on educational outcomes in Brazil. Additionally, Dr. Ho has worked on carbon labeling in the food industry, exploring how behavioral nudges can influence consumption choices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Dr. Ho’s work has been featured in outlets such as VoxDev, MIT News, and the Development Impact Blog. She is passionate about using evidence-based research to inform policies that address gender disparities and promote economic inclusion, and is excited to continue her work in academia while contributing to the broader conversation on development and social impact.
Dr. Lisa Ho
name
Dr. Devansh Jalota
Assistant Professor, Industrial & Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
Devansh’s interdisciplinary work blends concepts from operations research, economics, and computer science, and aims to develop foundational tools for resource allocation across a variety of sectors, including future mobility systems, artificial currency markets (such as Fisher markets), and electricity markets.
Before joining Stanford, Devansh earned his BS in Civil and Environmental Engineering and BA in Applied Mathematics from UC Berkeley. In August 2026, he will join the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) at Georgia Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor. Prior to this, he will spend a year as a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University’s Data Science Institute starting in August 2025.
Devansh is passionate about designing algorithms and incentive mechanisms that foster socially responsible, sustainable, and equitable resource allocation, with a particular emphasis on the future of mobility systems.
Dr. Devansh Jalota
Ethical Approach with Rigorous Results
- Privacy First – We protect community data with strict security, anonymization, and responsible use.
- Fair Compensation – Women’s insights matter. We pay for their time and expertise, valuing them as active contributors.
- Informed Consent – Transparency at every step. No data is collected or used without clear, voluntary agreement.
- Informed Consent – Transparency at every step. No data is collected or used without clear, voluntary agreement.
- Bias-Aware AI – We design inclusive, community-driven models that reflect real experiences, not just numbers.
- Impact with Integrity – Our solutions are ethical, equitable, and built for lasting change.
Affiliated Researchers
Dr. Suhani Jalota
Dr. Jasmin Moshfegh
Dr. Azra Ismail
Assistant Professor in Biomedical Informatics and Global Health,
Emory University
Dr. Lisa Ho
Dr. Devansh Jalota
By embedding ethical considerations into every aspect of our work, we ensure that our solutions are not only effective but also just, equitable, and community-driven.






What We’ve Accomplished
Join the movement to improve healthcare, economic opportunities, and digital access for 100 million more women
Local & Global Recognition
February 22, 2024
Ted Talk
August 7, 2019
Why this Indian foundation is on...
November 17, 2020
Cisco Youth Leadership Award...
November 17, 2020
How AI health care chatbots learn from...
Our Partners