Recently, NASSCOM Foundation and CGI (TSX: GIB.A) (NYSE: GIB), released India’s first Tech for Good Report. It contains insights from the inputs received from 548 organizations: 305 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 124 social enterprises and startups, and 119 corporations.
The key theme that transpires from this report is how India’s social and economic agents are focusing beyond traditional Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to create Tech for good solutions to help build a better, more sustainable society.
Covid-19 as an usher of change in the Tech for Good space in India
COVID-19 lockdown has become a substantial usher of change: Several organizations felt the strain due to the pandemic. 72% social enterprises claimed their business was severely affected by COVID-19 and 57% of the NGOs reported a hindrance in their monitoring capabilities.
However, the whole ecosystem found new opportunities in adversity with 63.5% of the organizations (corporates, social enterprises and NGOs) creating new technologies to tackle various challenges. Specifically:
- 6% worked on creating Tech for remote work
- 9% worked on Tech for remote Education
- 9% worked on new ways of monitoring and reporting
Key findings from India’s first Tech for Good Report 2021
Opportunities
More than 9 in 10 organizations view Tech for Good as a strategic focus, with education and livelihood emerging as dominant areas of focus and opportunity.
- 61% have already established a Tech for Good practice, while for 30.3%, it is a key strategic focus and are working towards it.
- 6% plan to create a new Tech for Good Practice and 2.5% is not currently looking at Tech for Good.
- For 93.97%, Tech for Good development aligns with their business strategy. Today, 66.38% of surveyed organizations report complete alignment and 27.6% display partial alignment with their plan.
- Global issues influence Tech for Good more than the local ones: 26% reported aligning Tech for Good to solve local issues, while 42.9% organizations aligned their Tech for good to solve global issues.
- The investment is ramping, with over 65% of the organizations setting dedicated teams for Tech of Good. Thirty-six percent of those have these teams present across various business units. A company with a clear Tech for Good practice spends an average of $36,515 on Tech for Good per year, which is consistently above their regular CSR contributions.
- Mobile and Web apps are the preferred choice for development and sustainable growth: Mobile apps (81.36%) and web apps (84.48%) rule the Tech for good development space as the most preferred technology, Artificial Intelligence (64.10%), Big Data (54.78%) and Cloud (72.65%) are also growing in this niche.
Challenges
Lack of Funds is the largest challenge for social enterprises to scale up their Tech for good solutions, as pointed out by 92% of them. Only 27% of social enterprises received CSR funds for scaling up.
- There is also a massive gap of 40 percent points in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) based solutions by the companies and their use by NGOs. There is also a large gap for Big Data (29.21), Cloud (31.01) and Blockchain (27.98)
- The study also exposes a significant skills gap for the NGOs across all technologies with a minimum 20 percent point gap in mobile app usage skills and a maximum 50 percent point gap for usage of AI based solutions.
Copyright: CC 3.0 – Jacobs School of Engineering, UC San Diego