There are 3.3 million nonprofits in India. Most of them are doing work that matters. Yet technology, the one thing that could multiply their impact, remains largely out of reach.
That situation was not hypothetical. It was the everyday reality that Akhila Somanath and her peers in the social impact sector lived with for years. And that frustration, quiet, persistent and shared by thousands of people doing important work across India, is what eventually became Tech4Good Community.
Three Women, One Question
Akhila, Rinju, Anusha did not set out to build an organisation. They had worked at different organisations in the social impact space before co-founding Tech4Good Community in 2018 What they set out to do was answer a simple question: why is technology so difficult for people who are trying to do good?
Tech4Good Community is a women-led organisation.
The beginning was modest. Akhila and her co-founders started sitting on the internet, looking for free tools that were friendly for nonprofits, testing them and building a playbook of what worked. They passed it around to peers. And then the messages started coming in.
That response, unsolicited, urgent and widespread, told them something important. The problem was not theirs alone.
From Playbook to Platform
“We are the beneficiaries of our own mission to begin with,” Akhila tells The Logical Indian.
That sentence captures the spirit of how Tech4Good Community works. The founders started by solving their own problems then looked up and realised they were standing in the middle of a much larger one. Most nonprofits run on thin budgets. Almost none have a dedicated technology team. The tools that do exist are either too expensive, too complicated or built without any understanding of what life on the ground actually looks like.
Tech4Good Community began by bridging that gap through capacity building, teaching organisations how to use tools that already existed rather than building new ones from scratch. The philosophy was deliberate and Akhila has a way of summing it up simply: “It’s always the people, the process and then the product.” If Google Analytics is free and useful for a nonprofit trying to track website traction for fundraising, the answer is not to build something new. The answer is to teach someone how to use what is already there.
Their build philosophy follows a simple rule. Eighty percent of the workflow is captured in the platform. The remaining twenty percent can always be customised because the software belongs to no one.
Only when a tool did not exist would the team build one. And when they built, they built openly.
The Open Source Principle
Open source is not just a technical choice for the Tech4Good Community. It is a value.
“We build in the open, it is for the open, it’s completely transparent,” Akhila explains. The idea is that technology for social impact cannot be built in a silo. If a nonprofit in a remote part of India is going to be affected by the software their organisation uses then the people closest to that work must be part of building it. As she puts it, “if their lives are going to be defined by the missions that are run by organisations, then this tech better be good.”
In 2023, Tech4Good Community made a formal decision to become an open source first organisation, under the mentorship of Kailash Nadh, CTO of Zerodha. That decision led to co-founding OASIS (Open-Source Alliance for Social Innovation and Sustainability), an alliance of organisations working in the open source space including TinkerHub, FOSS United, Akiyam Fellows and others. OASIS serves as a governing body for the advocacy and governance of open source tools being built and adopted in the social sector. It also specifically addresses a problem that many nonprofits have experienced: being burned by tech vendors who charged high fees, gave them no access to source code and left them stranded when the contract ended.
Oasis exists, as Akhila describes it, to bridge the gap between tech experts and nonprofits and to take the principles of open source, freedom, flexibility and affordability, to the last mile.
The First Fellowship: 35 People and a Room at Google
When asked about Tech4Good Community’s first community event, Akhila’s answer was telling. The event came before the organisation. The community showed up first.
It was 2018. The team sent out a post on Twitter and LinkedIn and waited to see what would happen. Word spread through friends telling friends and nothing more. The result was a three-day in-person workshop at the Google office in Bangalore, which they called the Tech for Good Fellowship. Thirty-five people flew in from across India to attend.
For Akhila, community has always meant something specific. “Community is somewhere that you feel safe, but also challenges you to do better,” she says. That first fellowship was proof that such a community existed and was waiting to be brought together.
From that first workshop in Bangalore, the team began travelling to Hyderabad, Shillong, Delhi and Chennai. They made nonprofit friends everywhere they went. Those friends brought venues, offered spaces and told other friends. Growth was entirely organic, with no marketing budgets and no campaigns.
Today, Tech4Good Community works with around 2,500 nonprofits and runs a team of 16 people.
Idli Stack and Other Programs
If the name Idli Stack makes you pause, that is part of the point. As Akhila puts it, “tech should feel easy to digest, not complicated.”
Idli Stack is a one-click deploy open source platform built by Tech4Good Community. It is designed to solve a specific and persistent problem. As Akhila explains to The Logical Indian, “there are open source tools out there, there is GitHub and there are nonprofits. Now, as a non-techie, I go to GitHub, I see multiple repos and then see, okay, what is readme? What is this? How do I deploy that tool? I don’t know how to do it.” The expertise required to set things up is a barrier that most nonprofits simply cannot cross.
Idli Stack removes that barrier. It stacks together operational efficiency tools for nonprofits including project management, data tools and communications infrastructure and makes everything deployable without writing a single line of code.
Beyond Idli Stack, the organisation runs a number of other programs. Ghosted is one, a collaboration with OASIS where student entrepreneurs from communities like TinkerHub and FOSS United are paired with nonprofits for an intensive one-week design and build sprint, creating websites on the open source platform Ghost. OASIS funds the build and the students contribute code with real purpose, working directly with a nonprofit rather than building in isolation. A program called Fundshui supports organisations in building fundraising management workflows. A Budget Lab helps nonprofit teams learn how to estimate and present technology costs to funders, a skill almost no one in the sector currently has.
There is also a Conservation Coalition, working with organisations across the Nilgiri Belt on shared open source tools for conservation data. The immediate focus is on invasive plants. The larger goal is the same one that runs through all of Tech4Good Community’s work: break the silos, share the data and build together instead of separately.
The Challenge of Managing a Community
Akhila is candid about the challenges of running Tech4Good Community. Competition, she says, is simply not a concept she holds in her head. When you build in the open there is no room for it.
The harder challenge is internal. A team of 16 people working with 2,000 organisations cannot do everything. Requests come in constantly and not everyone needs the same thing.
She talks about the constant internal work of prioritising requests and identifying which gaps are most urgent to address.
The answer, she says, is a deliberate focus on what the team can actually do well combined with transparency about what it cannot. When something does not work, Tech4Good Community talks about it openly. The learnings go out publicly so that others, perhaps younger entrepreneurs coming up behind them, can use that knowledge instead of making the same mistakes.
“Pick only one part and do it right,” she says. “Believe that the community will solve for the rest.”
Iteration Over Innovation
Looking back over eight years, Akhila describes the journey in three stages. Tech4Good Community started as a capacity building organisation. It moved into configuring existing open source tools. Then it moved into building its own open source infrastructure.
Each pivot was a response to what the community needed, not a grand plan drawn up in advance.
“We are an organisation that holds our values tight and our ideas loose,” she says. “It’s always iteration over innovation.”
That philosophy extends to how the team thinks about artificial intelligence. AI is important and will matter more as the work deepens. She is direct about the limits of AI in this context. If the data sitting in nonprofit offices across India is still siloed and unconnected, there is no foundation for any AI tool to work from. The basics have to come first.
It is a patient, grounded approach. And it is one that, eight years in, has brought 2,500 organisations along with it. As Akhila says of the journey, “it’s not just a journey of the founders, it’s a journey of this entire team, this tribe that we found.”
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
Technology is only as good as the people it reaches. That is the idea Akhila Somanath has spent eight years proving, one nonprofit at a time. And if her journey tells us anything, it is that the most important innovations are not always the loudest ones.
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