From International Business Times
Tech for social good: School of Information students at Berkeley show the way
By Satarupa Bhattacharya
The trend among business schools to launch courses or programs in "social entrepreneurship" or among their graduates to walk the "non-profit" path has been under the spotlight for quite some time now. But now, an innovative course offered to students of technology at the School of Information at UC Berkeley has led a group among them to work on commercializing one of their class projects to bring about a positive difference to the lives of the literate poor in distant Indian villages or urban slums.
The class project, titled 'MobileWorks', was evolved within the course Social Enterprise using ICTs for International Development, and aims to reach a slice of India's burgeoning outsourcing industry to groups who are currently excluded from its fruits. The project takes advantage of India's widespread mobile phone usage to send outsourced data-entry jobs through phones to India's villagers and slum residents, providing them fair trade wages.