In an increasingly digital world, access to technology is not just a convenience, it’s a lifeline. From mobile banking and online education to agricultural advice and healthcare information, digital tools are becoming essential for participation in the global economy. Yet, over 2.6 billion people remain unconnected, most of them in low- and middle-income countries, particularly in rural or marginalized communities (World Bank, 2023).
Bridging this digital divide requires more than connectivity infrastructure, it demands inclusive innovation, relevant content, affordability, and user empowerment. This is where the collaborative power of startups and large institutions becomes critical. While startups are often the trailblazers of innovation, large organizations are the force multipliers that bring scale, sustainability, and systems change.
Let’s explore how these two actors contribute to the future of digital inclusion and why their synergy is not optional, but essential.
The Field of Innovation is littered with the Corpses of Startups
Startups thrive in spaces where traditional systems fall short. With limited bureaucracy and an appetite for risk, they often build hyper-local, user-centered solutions tailored to specific needs. Many inclusive tech startups emerge directly from the communities they serve, meaning they understand the nuanced challenges of digital access, such as low literacy, lack of IDs, gender disparities, and irregular income flows.
Eneza is one of the unique startups that understands this and offers SMS-based educational content to learners in rural Kenya, where smartphones and internet access are limited and by delivering curriculum-aligned lessons via basic mobile phones, they reached over 6 million users across Kenya, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire. Their ability to adapt quickly to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic further demonstrated startup agility.
Startups also pilot emerging technologies like AI, or simple technology like USSD, or IVR for low-bandwidth environments. They experiment with new models, freemium subscriptions, social commerce, voice-based assistants, without being hindered by legacy systems.
Despite their creativity and community relevance, many startups hit barriers when trying to scale. The very qualities that make them nimble and innovative, limited size, fast iteration, niche focus can also become obstacles to reaching national or continental impact.
Some common scaling challenges include:
- Distribution Limitations: Startups often lack access to national infrastructure such as mobile networks, logistics systems, or retail agents.
- Regulatory Hurdles: Navigating complex or unclear policy environments can delay or block rollout across regions or countries.
- Funding Gaps: Many inclusive tech startups are mission-driven but struggle to attract patient capital for long-term expansion.
- Trust & Legitimacy: Rural users may hesitate to adopt a new service from an unknown provider without backing from a trusted institution.
A good example is SafeBoda (Uganda) provides motorcycle taxi rides with safety features and mobile payments. Though successful in Kampala, its expansion to new cities required infrastructure partnerships with telecom providers and integrations with national payment platforms. Expansion was slow without institutional support.
These examples underscore a simple truth that startups alone cannot build digital inclusion at scale. They can prove the model, but they need institutions to fuel the engine.
Large Institutions: The Scalers and Enablers
As previously shared, while startups spark change, they often hit limits and that’s where large institutions, governments, multilateral organizations, and corporations enter the picture. These actors can bring scale, infrastructure, regulation, and systemic reform.
A good example is Telco giants like Orange and MTN are increasingly opening their APIs to fintech and edtech startups. These partnerships help startups plug into existing payment, SMS, or identity services while enabling telcos to reach new market segments.
However, even giants stumble. While large organizations bring scale, infrastructure, and legitimacy, they also encounter critical barriers when attempting to deliver digital inclusion at the last mile. Their size, structure, and mandates can sometimes slow them down, making it difficult to serve the most disconnected communities effectively.
Here are some of the key challenges:
- One-Size-Fits-All Solutions: With a mandate to serve wide populations, large organizations often develop solutions designed for scale rather than nuance. This can lead to low adoption in rural areas where culture, language, or user behavior differs dramatically from urban or high-income settings.
- Low User Engagement: Many large-scale digital platforms see low engagement because they lack community-centered design. Users may not understand the offering or trust it, especially if there’s no grassroots outreach or education component.
- Digital Literacy Gaps: Rolling out a digital platform at scale doesn’t guarantee that users know how to use it. Without investing in user training or local champions, institutions often find their digital programs underutilized in rural or low-literacy populations.
These limitations highlight the complementary value of startups, where institutions bring scale and legitimacy, startups bring agility and user-centric innovation. Institutions know how to go far, but startups know how to go fast and local. The path to inclusive digital solutions lies in uniting both strengths.
What Needs to Happen Next?
Build Shared Value Partnerships, Not Just Pilots
Collaboration should go beyond CSR programs. Startups and corporations must align on mutual value, impact for the community, growth for the startup, and market relevance for the corporation. Long-term partnerships allow startups to plug into infrastructure, while corporations benefit from innovation pipelines and inclusion-focused brand equity.
Orange partnered with social impact startup Brastorne to launch a rural farmers go to platform, mAgri, which leverages USSD technology. Orange provided infrastructure and visibility; Brastone brought domain expertise and grassroots engagement. The result: over 5.3 million users now access agricultural information, skilled communities and marketplaces via mobile.
Co-Invest in Inclusive Infrastructure
Startups often build on top of telco, fintech, or identity infrastructure, but access is not always affordable, available, or optimized for low-income users. Corporations must co-invest in shared infrastructure, offering startups API access, zero-rated channels, and scalable integrations that allow them to grow without duplicating backend systems.
Create Joint Go-To-Market Strategies (GTM)
Startups often lack trusted distribution and brand recognition. Corporations often struggle to localize offerings in fragmented markets. A joint GTM approach, with co-branded campaigns, shared field agents, and localized messaging ensures inclusive products reach the right users with the right story.
How Mastercard partnered with Kasha, an e-commerce startup targeting low-income women, to integrate secure mobile payments and scale distribution is a top tier example of this. The partnership enabled Kasha to expand quickly while Mastercard advanced its mission of digital financial inclusion.
If digital inclusion is the goal, we must move from transactional relationships to transformational partnerships. Startups alone can’t scale. Corporations alone can’t localize. Together, they can build products that reach millions, but only if they share infrastructure, vision, and value.
