Financial Empowerment for Migrant Workers
Empowering low-income migrant workers through accessible financial education. We leverage Generative AI technologies to create dynamic content that meets customer needs with meaningful and simple communication.
Why A Financial Empowerment Platform
Motivation
Millions of workers are hired by employment agencies to migrate to the Middle East and take on low-income service jobs. Due to lack of financial opportunity in their home countries, these workers migrate to the Middle East and often send large portions of their earnings back to their home country to provide financial support to their families. Unfortunately, they face significant vulnerabilities including debt traps, recruitment expenses, lack of financial literacy, and limited knowledge of safe banking options. Many domestic workers—particularly live-in maids—lack formal financial education, resulting in instability both for themselves and their dependents back home.We strongly believe this is a problem with opportunity for widespread impact both across and beyond the Middle East. For our capstone project, we are focused specifically on the population of ~750,000 domestic workers in the UAE, specifically those who migrated from the Philippines and are working as live-in maids.
A Teammate for Every Worker
Our Vision
Our platform vision is to provide personalized tools that build trust, foster growth, enable financial empowerment, and strengthen community connections.• Digital Identity & Credit Score: Build trust with verified digital profiles to support safe banking and employment opportunities.• Coaching & Education: Personalized financial literacy and savings guidance tailored to migrant workers' unique needs.• Microfinance Matching: Connect workers with donors and microfinance opportunities to build stability and independence.• Community Engagement: Foster mentorship, peer support, and connections through community-driven programs.
What We Built
Berkeley Capstone Project
For our MVP, we took a focused approach to initially build for Filipino Maids in the UAE.Our field research, including a survey of 26 maids in the UAE, showed that financial literacy was a key priority for this user base. We designed and built a Financial Coach, tackling the Coaching & Education element of our vision for the full Aspaira platform.Leveraging demographic and financial information from user profile inputs, our user facing application uses Agentic AI and Gen AI techniques to walk users through dynamic, personalized financial education sessions.We also built a Multi-Judge AI Framework which scores conversations across criteria enabling robust, unbiased evaluation. These insights are then used to continuously improve the user facing application.
Demo of What We Built:
Tech Stack:
📱Steamlit UI
⚡FastAPI Backend
🛢️Data in DynamoDB
🧠Dify LLM Orchestration
☁️ Global AWS DeploymentApplication LinkGithub RepoFinal Presentation Slides
Carrigan Hudgins
Our Team
Kelly Short
Scott Belarmino
The Voice Of Our Users
Testimonials
"My biggest challenge is my children's education and providing for their basic needs while they are studying"
- Maria, Dubai Based Maid
"I love it 😍😍 very simple and intelligent"
- Katherine, Abu Dhabi Based User
"customization and personalization options were tailored to my personal needs and were assistive"
- Tala, Dubai Based Maid
AspAIra Feedback Form
Contact Us
We look forward to hearing from you!
Thank you
We thank maids.cc agency for initial feedback, the domestic workers who participated in our field research, Berkeley MIDS faculty and mentors, and Dify and AWS for enabling our rapid prototyping and deployment.