5 Social Enterprises Leveraging Technology for Social Change

When we hear the word "technology," what comes to mind?

Artificial intelligence. Smartphones. Apps. Automation. Robots.

Technology is often associated with making things faster, cheaper, or more convenient.

But technology can also do something else.

It can help someone access electricity for the first time.

It can help a farmer reduce dependence on diesel.

It can help a woman in a remote village become a solar engineer.

It can connect an entrepreneur who needs credit with someone willing to provide it.

This is where technology becomes more than a tool for convenience.

It becomes a tool for inclusion.

Here are five examples that show different ways technology can contribute to social change.

1. SELCO: What if technology was designed around people's realities?

Or installing a system but finding that there is no local service network to maintain it. The technology may work. The solution may still fail. SELCO began working with this problem in 1995, focusing on sustainable energy access for underserved communities in India.

But its approach goes beyond simply selling solar systems.

For example, energy solutions can be connected to livelihoods, healthcare, education, and small businesses.

The underlying idea is important:

Technology does not create impact simply because it is technically advanced. It creates impact when it fits the context in which people actually live.

This gives us one important lesson about social innovation:

2. ONergy Solar: Taking clean energy beyond the grid

Access to electricity is something many of us rarely think about.

We switch on a light.

We charge our phone.

We use a computer.

We open a refrigerator.

But for communities without reliable electricity, these everyday activities become much more difficult.

ONergy Solar works on this energy-access gap through decentralized solar solutions.

Founded in 2009, the organization works on designing, installing, financing, and maintaining solar systems for homes, businesses, institutions, and underserved communities.

ONergy reports that its work has reached more than one million lives.

Think about what a solar water pump can mean for a farmer.

The technology is not simply producing electricity.

It can reduce dependence on diesel, support agricultural activity, and potentially reduce the cost of accessing water.

This is an important distinction.

The social value of technology often comes from what people are able to do with it.

3. Barefoot College: What if the technology user became the technology expert?

Now consider a different question.

Barefoot College offers a fascinating example.

Through its Solar Mamas programme, rural women from marginalized communities are trained as solar engineers.

These women learn to assemble, install, maintain, and repair solar lighting systems before returning to their communities with the tools and knowledge required to continue the work locally.

The model challenges a common assumption about technology.

We often imagine technology moving from an expert to a user.

An engineer designs it.

A company installs it.

A customer uses it.

Barefoot College changes the relationship.

The community becomes part of the technical system.

The woman who receives training is not simply a beneficiary of solar electrification. She becomes a person capable of maintaining and extending it within her community.

4. Rang De: What if technology could change who provides finance?

For a small farmer, artisan, or entrepreneur, a lack of affordable credit can prevent a promising livelihood from growing.

Traditional financial systems may not always reach these borrowers on affordable terms.

Rang De approached this problem through social investing.

Its model connects social investors with borrowers while using technology, human-centered design, and financial systems to facilitate the relationship. Rang De became an RBI-registered NBFC-P2P platform in 2019.

The interesting part is not simply that Rang De uses an online platform.

The deeper innovation is about changing the relationship between the person who has capital and the person who needs it.

Technology becomes an infrastructure for participation. Someone sitting in one part of the country can participate in financing the livelihood of someone living somewhere else. This shows another dimension of social innovation:

Technology can reduce the distance between resources and people who need them.

5. Frontier Markets: What if technology could reach the last mile through people?

There is another major challenge.

Even when good products and services exist, how do they reach people in remote communities?

A product can be affordable.

A digital platform can exist.

A financial service can be available.

But if the intended customer does not know about it, trust it, or know how to access it, the technology has not solved the access problem.

Frontier Markets takes a different approach.

Its Meri Saheli platform supports activities ranging from customer data and marketing to ordering, payments, logistics, and market insights. The platform is designed for rural contexts, including multilingual interfaces and low-connectivity environments.

The human relationship remains central.

A rural woman entrepreneur can become the bridge between technology and the community.

The result is what Frontier Markets describes as a "phygital" model—combining physical relationships and digital technology.

This gives us another important lesson:

Sometimes technology does not replace human connection. It makes human connection more powerful.

The future of social innovation may not depend on choosing between technology and human connection.

It may depend on learning how to combine them.

Because the most meaningful technological innovation may not be the technology that looks the most futuristic.

It may be the technology that helps someone, somewhere, do something that was previously impossible.

☕ Coffee Break Question

Think about a social problem in your community.

If you had access to the right technology, what would you try to change?

And before asking "What technology can we use?", perhaps ask a more important question:

"What does the community actually need?"