The Conditions for Impact: when does digital and emerging technology work for underserved users?

Digital and emerging technologies, including AI, have widespread potential to catalyse social impact. But the evidence tells a more nuanced story: technology drives meaningful change for underserved and vulnerable users only when it is embedded in how they access services, make decisions, and build economic capability. When that condition isn't met, technology remains peripheral to the value being delivered. And in both cases, market conditions are often the deciding factor. 

As digital and emerging technologies become central to creating impact at scale, we need better frameworks for understanding where, when, and how they actually work, as well as what success looks like across diverse markets and business models. But technology is only part of the picture. Even where digital solutions are central to the value being delivered for underserved users, a second and equally critical question remains: can impact scale alongside commercial growth, or do the two pull in opposite directions? Current funding cuts from donors make the move towards commercial sustainability even more pressing for social enterprises, but this can put “deep impact” at risk as businesses shift towards revenue generation about all else. 

This session brings together three GSMA Innovation Fund grantees from Pakistan — Orenda (EdTech), Vceela (digital marketplace), and DeafTawk (assistive tech) — to share longitudinal evidence on the conditions under which digital technology drives real impact for vulnerable users. Each grantee will share a brief presentation on their impact pathway, exploring what enables and what constrains digital technology's potential at scale. Their cases will then be examined through the GSMA's scale-vs-impact framework, a practical tool that looks at how deeply social impact is integrated into a business's model and revenue generation, and the extent to which impact can grow in step with commercial success.