Ajira

• 

  Roshni Neupane

Ajira - Where Every Hour of Care Counts

-Inspiration Unpaid care work sustains families, communities, and economies, yet it remains largely invisible and unrecognized. Millions of women spend hours each day caring for children, elders, and households without documentation, value, or acknowledgment. Ajira was inspired by this gap. The goal was to create a platform that recognizes unpaid care work as real labor, gives it visibility, and restores dignity to those who perform it.

-What it does Ajira is a digital platform that enables users to log daily unpaid care activities such as childcare, elder care, cooking, cleaning, and emotional support. Each entry records time spent, earns task-based points, and contributes to a trust score. Users may optionally upload photos or videos as proof of work. Verified entries generate monthly reports showing total care hours and estimated economic value, turning invisible labor into actionable data for individuals, NGOs, and policymakers.

-How we built it Ajira was developed using Spring Boot with Java for backend logic and APIs, PostgreSQL for secure and scalable data storage, and Thymeleaf, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Bootstrap for a responsive user interface. Cloudinary is used to securely handle media uploads. The system supports role-based access for users, administrators, and NGOs, with a strong emphasis on simplicity, security, and accessibility.

-Challenges we ran into A key challenge was balancing verification and privacy, ensuring trust without making users feel monitored. Designing a fair and inclusive points and trust score system was complex due to the wide variety of care activities. Another challenge was building an interface accessible to first-time and digitally marginalized users while maintaining system robustness.

-Accomplishments that we’re proud of We built a functional platform that quantifies unpaid care work and generates verified records and reports. The system includes media-based verification, a trust score model, and a Care Connector concept to support users without direct digital access. Most importantly, Ajira creates visibility and dignity for care work that has historically gone unrecognized.

-What we learned This project demonstrated that technology can be a powerful tool for social change when built with empathy. We learned the importance of user-centered design, accessibility, and trust in social impact platforms, as well as how technology can intersect meaningfully with policy and advocacy.

-What’s next for Ajira Future plans include AI-based care categorization, multilingual support, partnerships with NGOs and government bodies, policy-ready data exports, and scaling Ajira into a national and global care economy platform. Ajira represents a step toward formally recognizing care work as essential labor.

Built With

• bootstrap
• cloudinary
• java
• oauth
• postgresql
• springboot
• springsecurity
• thymeleaf