Impact of Technology on the sustainable development of vulnerable communities in the State of Mexico.

Abstract

A community is in a vulnerable situation when its inhabitants have at least one social deficiency in six indicators: educational lag; access to health services; access to social security; quality and spaces of the home; basic services in housing and access to food, also if your income is insufficient to acquire the goods and services you require to satisfy your food and non-food needs. Vulnerability is associated with inequality, which tends to weaken social cohesion, economic growth and incite social tensions, instability and conflicts, which affects everyone on the planet. Therefore, it is essential to act to promote common well-being. The mission of Tecnológico de Monterrey is to train whole people, with a humanistic vision; citizens committed to the economic, political, social and cultural development of their community and to the sustainable use of natural resources as a strategy to reduce poverty and inequality. To achieve this, the Social Innovation Laboratories have been created, spaces that link the university with the community, university practice strategies, extension and social projection, and civil society. to solve social problems, through the application of innovation and technology processes for social appropriation. In the laboratories, students are constantly faced with solving challenges present in real-life problems. The objective is to acquire learning and develop disciplinary and transversal skills through experiences obtained by interacting with inhabitants of vulnerable communities; executing actions based on engineering, chemical and biotechnological processes, applying exponential technologies to transform communities into sustainable ones, by delivering the products built during the challenge to the inhabitants of the community. The results demonstrate great scope and mutual benefits: the significant increase in the learning and development of disciplinary and transversal skills of the students and the gradual transformation of the communities towards a better quality of life.