Contributions of Non-Profit Startups to Education and Health Sectors
Fakih Amrin Kamaluddin and Kala S Sridhar
Abstract
Recent years have seen a surge in the emergence of non-profit startups who are harnessing the power of technology in order to benefit the marginalised and under-privileged sections of society. Given their significance to society, this paper studies the contributions of non-profit startups to social sectors—education and health. We take six cases and describe their impact on these two sectors. Interviews were supplemented with information on startups’ websites. Our findings in this research are that the non-profit startups create value for education and health sectors in diverse ways. Edtech startups create value by providing age- based competency to students and by exposing them to challenging experiments which push critical thinking, design and problem-solving skills. Healthtech startups create value by providing access to unused capacity, reduction in the workload of hospitals, reducing waiting time and kilometres travelled to seek consultation. Raising funds was a severe challenge for these edtech and healthtech startups which solely relied on government projects for survival, although they assist the government too.