Donors Want Transparency From Their Supported NGOs

As taxpayers and the general public grow increasingly wary of trusting the institutions in their societies — banks, governments, and NGOs included — transparency is becoming crucial to donor organisations as well. Donors are increasingly looking to support NGOs with high levels of transparency.

NGOs that service their donors and the general public with transparent financials, outcomes of M&E studies, and conflict-of-interest disclosures are likely to succeed in a world increasingly demanding of transparency.

Engineers Without Borders published a failure report, detailing areas in which they failed to have the impact they had sought. The report was designed to generate a culture of failing forward and failing transparently, in order to grow, improve, and react more nimbly to the needs of the organisation’s stakeholders.

The idea of failing forward is rooted in the notion that people will make mistakes, but mistakes are excellent sources of learning for the future. By revealing areas where the impact wasn’t as hoped for, organisations can develop cultures where mistakes are learned from and gain the trust of their donors.

Blockchain Technology: A Bridge to Transparency?

Blockchain technology is ordinarily thought of as a means to transfer value around the internet. But it is, in fact, a whole lot more than that.

As we wrote about before:

“While supply chain, logistics, cryptocurrency donations, and micropayment apps have been the frontrunning beneficiaries of blockchain technology in the sector, Havuta’s data collecting app signals a shift toward renewed interest in helping NGOs restore trust and confidence in the general public and their donors. Trust and confidence are key benefits of distributed ledger technology, and Havuta aims to bring those benefits to NGOs in the field.”

Our use of blockchain technology creates verifiable hashed records of impact on a public blockchain. The hashed representations themselves are not human-decipherable, but they record results immutably so that donors can always request the data behind the impact reporting, knowing that it can be trusted.

In a world of waning trust in institutions, Havuta wants to help restore the prestige of the aid and development sector.

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