Digital platforms resembling Uber, Airbnb, WeChat and TaskRabbit have modified the world by creating new economic opportunities by gig work culture and enabling a sharing economy. However, issues stay about how these platforms might exploit gig workers and prospects if pushed purely by revenue.

While these platforms are nice at creating value by bringing buyers, sellers and consumers together, their advantages usually don’t transcend to their ecosystem. They have been criticized for his or her poor social and environmental impacts, exclusionary practices, digital colonialism and surveillance capabilities.

To leverage the facility of platforms for social good, it’s essential to design socially-oriented platforms inside ecosystems of shared value that concentrate on the UN’s sustainable improvement targets.

To give attention to sustainable improvement targets, platforms want to vary from being completely targeted on income and worth appropriation, to perceiving themselves as public goods that innovate responsibly by co-creating and sharing financial, social and environmental worth.

While that is simpler stated than performed, some organizations have begun the process.

A brand new non-profit

Commercial platforms are anticipated to earn an estimated $60 trillion by 2025. Meanwhile, the Platform Commons Foundation — an Indian non-profit that builds inclusive platforms to handle world grand challenges — is concentrated on creating social worth, whereas financial worth is secondary.

The Platform Commons Foundation has launched a variety of platforms targeted on sustainable improvement targets resembling poverty alleviation, offering high quality training and respectable work, bettering financial development and decreasing inequalities.

One of the Platform Commons Foundation’s many platforms — I Got Garbage — reworked the lives of underpaid and marginalized waste administration employees in India’s informal sector, who confronted frequent harassment and exploitation, by serving to them earn a gradual revenue and a dignified livelihood.

Another platform — Commons.farm — is an agritech platform that gives equitable and accessible companies to smallholder farmers that face challenges throughout the agricultural provide chain.

Smallholder farmers make up 80 to 90 per cent of India’s agriculture. Yet, they personal lower than 5 acres of land and often develop solely two crops a 12 months. They are sometimes unable to search out consumers for his or her produce, forcing them to solely promote by middleman managed markets.

Let’s take a better have a look at these platforms.

Revolutionizing waste administration

I Got Garbage turned the casual waste assortment course of into a proper course of. The platform consists of an ecosystem of thousands of citizens, government and municipal officers, non-governmental organizations, waste employee communities and different establishments.

By formalizing the waste assortment course of, I Got Garbage reworked waste employees into micro-entrepreneurs who can earn sustainable wages and defend themselves from exploitation.

I Got Garbage did this by a number of know-how interventions. Some of those interventions embrace the I Got Garbage app that runs on low-cost cellphones, SMS and WhatsApp-based communications in varied Indian languages, waste and recycling administration planning software program, customer support coaching, offering uniforms and identification badges, geotagging areas for waste pick-up and monitoring wages.

I Got Garbage labored with the neighborhood of waste employees to grasp their issues and acquire their belief. It additionally signed households up for its companies by way of Facebook and SMS/WhatsApp campaigns.

I Got Garbage made a major influence because it diminished landfill waste by 40 per cent and processed greater than 10,000 tons of recycling supplies day by day in a single metropolis. It employed greater than 15,000 waste employees and expanded to a number of cities in lower than 5 years since its inception.

I Got Garbage has led to a revolution of waste administration and recycling in India which is ready to be replicated in 72 countries in Asia and Africa.

Empowering farmers and stopping suicide

The Indian agricultural sector suffers the identical fragmentation and casual course of points because the waste administration sector.

Productivity points, corruption and provide chain points inside India’s agricultural sector are so stark they’ve brought on a suicide epidemic amongst debt-ridden smallholder farmers. Over 10,000 farmers died in 2020 alone in accordance with the federal government.

The state of affairs was dire and wanted intervention on the grassroots degree.

The Platform Commons Foundation launched Commons.farm in 2019 to help farmers and regional governments in and round Bengaluru. The concept was the identical as I Got Garbage, apart from the income mannequin — empowering farmers by connecting them with one another to type co-operatives, resolving agriculture provide chain points, enabling communication amongst farmers, governments and markets, and bettering social and environmental influence.

This would empower smallholder farmers with digital instruments to scale back waste, lower out corruption and talk immediately with suppliers and prospects.

The platform obtains its major revenues from government subsidy programs as a substitute of charging farmers for companies. Local and state governments that use Commons.farm obtain assured influence outcomes from the cash they spend on the platform, which is a fraction of the general subsidy invoice they’d in any other case incur.

Sustainable use of digital platforms

Platforms like I Got Garbage and Commons.farm that additionally give attention to sustainable improvement targets are gaining consideration. The FRANCIS project, for instance, hosts open innovation challenges in Europe that contain residents, scientists and lecturers. Its purpose is to develop inexpensive improvements that tackle real-world challenges.

Citizens can be a part of the challenges by way of the web platform or in face-to-face occasions. Scientists run workshops in the course of the challenges that supply technique coaching. This undertaking is presently engaged on a photo voltaic disinfection undertaking focusing on low- to middle-income households in rural areas, folks in refugee camps and micro-entrepreneurs.

The Indian authorities has additionally created its personal set of public platforms that it calls the India Stack. It has constructed a biometric digital identity platform, a real-time mobile payment platform, a COVID-19 vaccine records platform and an open and inclusive e-commerce platform.

Digital platforms can be utilized as personal pipelines that allow monopolies or they can be utilized as open, inclusive mechanisms leveraged for the public good.

By studying from examples which have leapfrogged frequent platform pitfalls to give attention to the general public good, we are able to transfer in direction of an equitable and empowering model of digital transformation. We have the chance to emulate these profitable examples in our personal contexts.