Tracing Long-Term Impact: How Tech Can Help Social Impact Funds and NGOs

As Bill Gates has stated, “By embracing data, research, and the collective knowledge of their local community, schools have an opportunity to help students succeed in high school, college, and beyond. It’s an approach that empowers schools to identify their most pressing challenges and the tools to design the right solutions.”

The ILO has long held the view that “The principal goals of tracer studies are to document changes in the lives of former beneficiaries, find out what these former participants are currently doing and gain insight that will allow organizations to improve their performance and better plan projects and activities… Implementing agencies usually have a fairly good idea of what the [beneficiaries] are doing for the duration of the project, and at the moment it ends. However, the real challenge is for interventions to produce lasting, long-term results. The ultimate measure of the success of an intervention is for the desired changes in the lives of [beneficiaries] to still be present, in some manner, after the project itself has phased out.”

Many TVET institutions and other development actors are unable to prove the long-term impact of their intervention efforts after their programs have concluded. This is because tracking the progress of the beneficiaries of their projects is expensive and time-consuming. Havuta has created a blockchain-based solution to the tracer data problem.

Havuta’s HIE token-fueled ecosystem, based on the Telos blockchain, helps NGOs gather tracer data from their beneficiaries over longer time horizons, enabling them to measure the impact that their interventions have over the long-term. This means they are able to update and improve their programs to be more effective in the long run and achieve their goals by receiving data from the community level, transparently, and without human bias. In turn, donors and other investors are better able to determine the impact the NGOs they support are having.

For example, Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) institutions can trace the progress of their alumni, collect information on their careers and assess the impact of their education programs. Institutes whose current data collection practices are limited to baseline (before the intervention) and post-intervention surveys (taken immediately following the conclusion of the program) will be able to deploy Havuta to get a bigger and better picture of the real, long-term impact of their interventions.

An additional problem many organizations face in what is currently the daunting task of sourcing tracer data is locating their beneficiaries. The ILO points this out when they made recommendations for gathering tracer data, suggesting a substantial percentage of the human and financial resources spent doing so was on locating beneficiaries, because of the natural movement of people over the course of their lives. “The actual task of tracing the former beneficiaries may be complicated since information on their whereabouts may be dated or incomplete,” they conclude.

Havuta makes tracking down or locating beneficiaries virtually costless. Organizations are able to onboard their beneficiaries at the beginning or conclusion of a program and use Havuta’s push notification capabilities to survey their former beneficiaries. Our solution could prove enormously beneficial and cost-effective for training institutions.

Havuta offers an elegant, efficient, and simple way of gathering data long after the conclusion of a program, informing development actors of their actual impact on beneficiaries’ lives in ways that are largely cost-prohibitive under current practice. That data will help social impact funds make the right decisions when considering investments.

Paul de Havilland is the Director of Strategy and Communications for Havuta LLC, a Geneva-based data consultancy company that offers tech-based data solutions to social impact funds and NGOs, with the aim of empowering them to prove and improve their impact.

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