Effective Humanitarian Aid:
Don’t Send Money!
The total global budget for humanitarian aid stands at just $22 billion. And at 0.3 percent of GDP, the $135 billion spent on all aid last year — on poverty reduction as well as humanitarian crises — by members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) fell well short of the UN’s target of 0.7 percent…
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-06-16/improving-humanitarian-aid?cid=soc-tw-rdr
Over the next decade, donors need to not just double the amount of aid directed to the places of greatest need but also undertake reforms that seek to double the productivity of aid spending. Doing that would require significant shifts in practices and assumptions.
GOODdler is set to revolutionize the way humanitarian and disaster relief aid is distributed. It engages local players to the max, providing an effective way for non-cash aid to be delivered to those in need. Think about it!
There is no reason for basic goods or food to help victims of a disaster, let’s say of an earthquake in Nepal, to be shipped all the way from the United States or Europe, while local retailers, having all the necessary items available for sale, see a decline in business during this difficult time.
Gooddler offers a solution that not only makes a distribution of basic goods in the disaster areas effective and efficient, but also empowers local communities.
What is GOODdler? It is an online aggregator of retailers for civic and charitable organizations. It offers to these organizations a localized, country-by-country approach to creating wishlists, combining goods from large international retailers and smaller local players. Once a wishlist is created, supporters from around the world can purchase items from the list and items are delivered in the most efficient way, locally.
Despite the predictability of the crisis, it still takes six to eight weeks for money to get from a donor, via UN agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and local partners, to an actual recipient. And in the first year after a flood, each dollar can cost up to 46 cents to transfer.
On the contrary to the example above, let us tell you a story how GOODdler makes each dollar stretch to the max.
Journey Nepal, a charity in Kathmandu created a wishlist on GOODdler platform with items from a local retailer with prices as they are in Nepal. Supporters in US purchased goods from the wishlist and once enough of them was purchased to load a truck, a local retailer personally delivered all the goods to the charity. He was extremely happy to be a part of the solution at the time when a local community didn’t have any purchase power and had to rely on an international humanitarian help.
Unless donors begin requiring aid organizations to report the cost of delivering services, those groups will lack an important incentive to improve efficiency and share best practices… Cutting out some of the layers of bureaucracy could radically reduce transaction costs. And greater transparency about costs would force each link in the aid-delivery chain to justify its role.
GOODdler does just that, it cuts out the layers of bureaucracy and provides transparency. It helps global civic and charitable organizations to meet the basic needs of their constituencies by connecting them to international communities and allowing individual supporters from anywhere around the world to easily purchase items requested by organizations they support. As a result, help is delivered to those in need on a scale it had never reached before.
Donors need to encourage organizations to collaborate on areas of efficiency (such as procurement and other back-office functions) yet compete on quality… Some of the greatest economic leaps have been spurred not by competition between companies but by competition between technologies. The same logic should apply to providing aid in fragile places.
A current trend in philanthropy is an online giving, but at the moment it is limited to monetary giving. Goods are still donated in an old-fashioned way, by physically bringing items to a charitable organization or mailing it.
Younger generations prefer to donate goods and they prefer to do it online. Charities don’t have tools to express their specific needs and to offer online goods donation option to their supporters. GOODdler has developed an amazing technology that disrupts the field of philanthropy. This technology makes the processes of delivering disaster and relief aid much more efficient and effective. It serves the needs of all, organizations that provide help, donors who want to see a direct effect from their support and the end recipients of the support.
