To paraphrase Bangladeshi Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, trends such as financial and technology innovation, the proliferation of social media, and globalization can massively help or harm society’s most vulnerable people. Which scenario becomes reality depends in large part on enlightened government policies and bold efforts by civil society, especially nonprofit organizations, to harness these forces for good.
Information technology can clearly help government agencies and nonprofits work more efficiently. But there are also tantalizing opportunities to put tech products directly in the hands of vulnerable people and communities to create big positive impact. Nowhere is this trend more prominent than in India, home to an educated and tech-savvy workforce and where—despite decades of impressive progress—pockets of poverty, illiteracy, and ill-health that dwarf those of any other nation. The COVID-19 pandemic proved to be an essential accelerator that forced Indian civil society organizations to get experience rolling out new tech-driven models.
Let me give a few more examples of the tantalizing possibilities that are emerging:
One area is enabling government programs to operate more efficiently, a topic I have written about elsewhere. The Antara Foundation developed its Integrated AAA App to ensure greater coordination and enhanced information sharing among three frontline health workers: nurse-midwives, community mobilizers, and nutrition counselors. As a result, more than five times the number of high-risk children and pregnant women have been identified, worker efficiency has increased by 25 percent, and there was a 300 percent increase in pregnant women and those with newborns registering for free nutritious food.
Wadhwani AI, a nonprofit research institution, is using artificial intelligence to help analyze large amounts of data to make quick inferences that help to solve critical problems. For example, it has created rapid response mechanisms to pests that impact cotton farmers (who typically suffer 30 percent crop loss). Significant impact is also anticipated in health care, where AI can analyze the sounds of patient coughs to diagnose tuberculosis and help rural doctors without access to radiologists analyze X-rays.
Pratham has created an offline speech recognition system that improves children’s speech and reading in several Indian regional languages and also an early childhood care and education bot called Baalsakhi that is based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology. Baalsakshi offers personalized and on-demand support for early childhood care and education by delivering immediate answers tailored to parents’ and caregivers’ specific questions via WhatsApp in any of the major Indian languages.
One of the persistent issues holding back development is people not discovering and accessing government services for which they are eligible. In response, Haqdarshak is using technology to support a next-generation welfare delivery system at the last mile. They enable citizen access to government welfare schemes and financial services that they were previously unaware of. Importantly, Haqdarshak also addresses the need for human intermediation to magnify technology’s impact by training local intermediaries to guide citizens through the application process and to collect required documentation.
And of course there is Karya, featured in Time magazine’s ‘AI by the People, For the People’ issue, which has enabled the rural poor to contribute voice recordings of them speaking in regional dialects to help train AI to deliver better results in more languages, and get paid for doing so! In one case, a woman was able to earn the equivalent of $32 for six hours of work, roughly the same as a teacher’s monthly salary. The organization has ensured that contributors control their own data and will continue to get paid for all future uses.
The Indian government’s development of a robust digital public infrastructure—based on its creation of Aadhaar (a 12-digit individual identification number which serves as proof of identity and proof of address for all residents of India), the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Open Networks for Digital Commerce, and the national language translation mission known as Bhashani—holds out great promise to accelerate technology for social good by ensuring last mile delivery of benefits and services, among many other benefits. It was in part to harness the power of this new infrastructure that the India Philanthropy Alliance, a network of more than 20 leading Indian nonprofits, created a technology-in-development working group last year.
Are there risks in applying technology to solve social problems? Of course there are. We can’t ask it to do too much, or neglect the need to ensure a vital human dimension in development work that can enhance impact and reduce risks of unintended harm. Wrong information generated by AI about health care, agriculture, or market prices that looks authoritative can sometimes be relatively harmless, but in other cases it can do lasting damage.
Yet we can and must manage these risks, while working to fully harness the power of emerging technologies to support the vibrant civil society sectors in South Asia and beyond. This opportunity is far too big to ignore, and one that we hope to advance through the second annual India Giving Day scheduled for March 1, 2024.
Alex Counts is the Director of India Giving Day and the India Philanthropy Alliance. He is the author of Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind: Leadership Lessons from Three Decades of Social Entrepreneurship (Revised edition) (Rivertowns Books, 2021)
