Charitable Aid Accountability for Humanitarian Agencies
Well-designed, appropriate humanitarian aid programmes bring greater choice, dignity, privacy, and protection to beneficiaries, while enabling humanitarian entities to more efficiently and effectively meet the needs of the most vulnerable populations.
However, allocating charitable aid - whether by humanitarian agencies, grantmaking processes, or public service providers - can involve a complex task of ensuring all donations are recorded, verified, and justified to comply with regulation and guidance from local public administrations. These recording, verification, and justification tasks are sometimes done on paper, mostly due to legal requirements, and then manually entered into a technology system.
Due to this, one of the largest management costs for many humanitarian agencies is the personnel hours spent compiling, verifying, and justifying how the charitable aid has been allocated and spent by the beneficiary - while also ensuring that data protection, beneficiary privacy, traceability, transparency and a fair process are upheld.
It is becoming increasingly important to enable better transparency and accountability within public service provision and humanitarian development activities - especially those that affect vulnerable and minority communities.
Solutions using Distributed Ledger Technologies have the potential to enable greater access to funds by most vulnerable groups while incentivising greater accountability against impact metrics. DLTs can enable the scale up of innovative finance models that widen the scope and impact potential of charitable aid. Furthermore, greater accountability and transparency can facilitate humanitarian agencies to engage with more people beyond beneficiaries and shift finance models from donations to a long-term investment horizon, as well as a lever of change against administrations and legislators.
Challenge Owner
Through a strategy of Connecting for Good, Vodafone Foundation (UK registered charity 1089625) combines Vodafone's charitable giving and technology to create long-term, sustainable programmes that help to address the world’s most pressing problems. Its work is centred around four core pillars of activity; Connected Learning, Connected Health, Connected Living, and a portfolio of apps.
Vodafone Foundation is supported by Digital Future Society - a programme of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Business in collaboration with Mobile World Capital Barcelona. The aim of this programme is to build an inclusive, equitable, and sustainable future in the digital era, by engaging policymakers, civic society organisations, academic experts, and citizens to respond to the challenges of the digital age.
The Challenge
As part of the charitable aid activities of the Vodafone Foundation, the organisation is currently facing barriers with the reporting, verification, and justification processes of how charitable aid is distributed and used by beneficiaries. These issues are common to different types of organisations across Europe responsible for the movement and verification of grants, charitable aid, as well as the provision of public goods and services.
Potential Challenge Areas
Enabling the conversion of data (e.g from purchases made with charitable aid card / ticket used by Vodafone Foundation beneficiaries) to a digital format to enable the traceability of humanitarian aid in the whole "end to end" process (including all the participants in the life cycle of the delivery of goods: AAPP, trade), and its integration into automated records;
Supporting Vodafone Foundation to map its workflows related to resource allocation by enabling digital traceability of services for specific processes (i.e. donations, local support services, etc.);
Enable automatic reporting of resource allocation (in which categories allocations are being spent) to help support the Vodafone Foundation’s resources and services management.
Enabling the integration of charitable aid partners, such as in-person and online retail stores, where beneficiaries can freely use the charitable aid they receive, through a marketplace / platform model which connects different types of support and beneficiary groups.