MAYA- BANGLADESH’S NEW AGE AGONY AUNT
Maya- Bangladesh’s new age Agony Aunt
Femme Smart is a new segment at continnect. In this segment, we look at apps created by or for women. We talk
about newly created apps- Apps that help with social gains and empowerment, lifestyle apps and apps that are used
particularly by women every day and apps that are popular with women across the globe.
This week, we head to Bangladesh and explore Maya – an online forum connecting Bangladeshi women across the
globe.
The team
Maya soon grew from being a blog to being a womenfocused website. And the team behind this inspiring website is mostly led by women. “The engineers who created
our first app and website were women, and most all of our
internal teams are headed by women. We believe strongly
in living our values of empowerment inside and outside
the office and one of the ways we do that is by encouraging women in our office to ‘lean in’.” says Tamanna.
Maya
“Salam Apa” — Most questions begin with this greeting
on the website. A first of its kind in Bangladesh, fondly
referred to as Maya Apa (elder sister)- the website and
its app is the new age Agony Aunt helping women in
Bangladesh discuss, debate and open up their thoughts on
issues of pregnancy, motherhood and women’s health.
Team Maya began by responding to the few questions that
they would get every day. The number of questions grew
from 15 to 30 a day. “We realized quickly that this was
the ‘killer feature’ and in 2014, Maya pivoted to focus
primarily on becoming what the Maya Apa service is now,”
she says.
A glance at Maya’s homepage tells us just that. From simple health tips, sex education, pregnancy and motherhood
related queries Maya Apa has answered over 100,000
questions from women across the country. Other than the
questions the site also features articles related to these
topics.
The Idea
Maya began as a blog. Ivy Russell first started Maya in
2009, soon after having her first child. She named it after
her mother who was fighting breast cancer at that time.
All Ivy wanted then was to create a digital space to gather,
create and share female oriented content in Bangladesh.
“She found there to be a massive gap between the information/knowledge women needed in a country like
Bangladesh, and how they could access it,” says Tamanna
Ahmad, who heads the communications team at Maya.
The goal then became to provide high quality, locally relevant content to women, especially mothers. “On a whim,
she added a very basic comment box on the homepage
with the call to action, ‘Ask Maya Apa anything’.”.
The open question and answer format is a hit among
July 2016 Edition from continnect.com
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