By: The NuSocia Translational Centre (NTRC)
The social sector space is fundamentally run on evidence garnered from communities and beneficiaries that are being impacted. Without this data, problems cannot be identified and even well intentioned programs, projects, and social impact products are rendered useless. Imagine a community that lives near a polluted stream. Social enterprises, public or private, flood in trying to fix the problem deemed most pertinent: the polluted river stream. This may serve the purpose of CSR, employee volunteerism, or even ESG if they are located within the area and clean up the river as part of the environmental efforts and help the community benefit under their social efforts. From end to end, data becomes key: if they had conducted a needs assessment perhaps they would have learnt that the top priority of the community may not be cleaning up the river. If they do not have a standardized method of collecting and calculating water offsets, their environmental strategies will not have return on investment or impact data, and so on and so forth. Data is required for everything.
As data assurance becomes mandated in India, especially through annual CSR Reports and ESG BRSR Reports, this form of data collection, storage, use, disclosure and dissemination will need to become more streamlined, documented, and verifiable. This however, comes at a time where data privacy and use is also scrutinized. In 2023, India passed their much required Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA). This Act, although extremely pertinent, throws up some challenges for those in the social sector. Implementing agencies, NGOs, CBOs and other true grassroots organizations that make an impact in beneficiary lives generally struggle in ensuring funding for existing and running programs with limited amounts to reinvest in their own capacity. Without much overhead funding, effective growth in operations becomes difficult, let alone understanding data privacy laws, creating new guidelines and data infrastructure, and ensuring compliance one hundred percent of the time seems like a tall order. These ground realities need to be taken into account during the implementation and stakeholders, i.e. funders, although should require these compliances, need to support their on ground implementers in adopting good data privacy practices.
The DPDPA, also brings about new opportunities for new players to enter the social impact space, especially as support for existing NGOs and CBOs. Grassroot organizations have an indispensable role within target communities that should be supported and leveraged. “Tech for Good” organizations can provide services and Digital Public Goods such as social sector data infrastructures and systems that are DPDPA compliant that support current social sector players to quickly adopt new technologies and be compliant, transparent, and ethical when it comes to their data practices. This new need for data and better use of data also attracts a new type of skilling and talent to the field in data analytics, database creation and management, and ensuring compliance and integrity of the data. This rising tide of evidence based research, implementation, and evaluation in India is a welcome challenge in the social development sector and brings about a better quality, transparency, and accountability of socially good programs. The private sector, especially tech social enterprises, have new, highly scalable opportunities for the betterment of India’s growing and evolving social sector.
