At Singtel, our purpose is to empower people and businesses and create a more sustainable future
We recognised that technology and digitisation have a critical role to play in enabling positive social impact and empowering the vulnerable in our community. However social impact start-ups with digital innovations faced significant challenges in scaling their product.
Through Singtel Future Makers, our social innovation programme, we want to help start-ups in the social and environmental sector make a difference with their solutions.
Given our ICT capability and product technology, Singtel is well placed to build capacity, partnerships and scale social impact start-ups. We also work with partners to catalyse go-to-market local and regional opportunities and build a social innovation ecosystem to accelerate the start-ups' growth.
"We believe in addressing social, community and environmental causes in the markets where we operate. One way in which we do this is to drive social innovation through Singtel Future Makers. Since no person or organisation can go it alone in sustainability efforts, we hope to spur start-ups which share our vision by providing support for them through capacity building and mentorship workshops and connecting them with our ecosystem of partners."
Andrew Buay,
Vice President, Group
Sustainability, Singtel
Going Regional
Since the launch in Singapore in 2016, Singtel Future Makers has gone regional to Australia, Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand. Our subsidiaries Optus and associates Telkomsel, Globe, AIS, Airtel joined the movement with their very own local accelerator programmes, supporting local entrepreneurs as they leverage technology to address unique social challenges in their own communities.
To date, we have invested more than $5 million in the local and regional SFM programmes and supported 85 local and regional social impact start-ups. Check out their inspiring stories here.