Establishing a social entrepreneurial system to bridge the digital divide for the poor: a case study for Taiwan

摘要

The issue of narrowing the digital gap for disadvantaged people has been widely discussed. Yet, the study of how to enable low-income people and homeless wanderers to access computers and the Internet, thereby enabling their upward movement in society, has been relatively neglected. In this paper, the authors aim to meld the literature on digital divide and social entrepreneurship to propose a social entrepreneurial system which uses universal service funds to spread IT technologies, leading to greater entrepreneurship and the gradual alleviation of poverty among disadvantaged people. The theoretical model is followed by a case study of the Taiwanese government's efforts to ameliorate digital divides. The case study is used to show the size of the access problem and identify factors which cause inefficiencies in the current approach to reduce the digital divide. After showing the need to establish a social entrepreneurial system to solve these problems and effectively use the Internet as a means to reduce poverty, the paper concludes by discussing the model's contribution to and implications for the social entrepreneurship literature and digital divide literature.