There are a lot of conversations going on about corruption with donor-funded projects/activities in low-income countries. This has led to donor fatigue which implies that individual donations reduce because donors feel powerless about how to ensure their money gets to the direct beneficiaries.
Here’s one way we will help in reducing corruption: Causevest has operators within communities where beneficiaries live to ensure that causes on our platform are valid. We have also set up transparent audit trails to make sure that all income donated is accounted for.
What’s going to be very interesting about Causevest within the next one year is how we will be working with communities to ensure citizens participation in projects we fund.
I’d love to hear any ideas on operators working on the ground to improve audit trails while keeping safe. I was really concerned for Laura when she was investigating causes in Sri Lanka for example. Operators do really important work its imperative that we support them and Causevest helps us do this.
What about you Ojonwa ? You work with so many development projects can you suggest anyway for us to make life easier for operators who work with us.
Interesting that you brought up safety. Operators are primarily meant to be very conversant of the community where the project is located in. Before visiting a community, it is important to know the security situation within that area. Furthermore, there are to be fully engaged with the beneficiaries of the project and relevant stakeholders within that community.
For instance, if an amount is released to build a hospital within a community, an operator should visit the government office directly responsible for health within that community, visit the community leaders/ traditional ruler, inform a number of beneficiaries about the projects (ideal locations for such awareness campaigns are markets, and social gatherings). With this action, you get the community to join you as an operator in effectively monitoring the project.
Informing security agents about the project and any potential threat is also important.
Ideally, operators should be from within the state/county where a cause is located because they should have relevant contextual knowledge that should help with navigating security issues.
For instance, in conflict-affected areas such as north-eastern Nigeria, I engage individuals within the affected states to monitor the construction of schools and primary healthcare centres. This approach has helped us avoid security issues such as kidnappings.
It is also important to blend in. Do a mini-research of the culture of the community before visiting to monitor causes that Causevest has invested in.
This highlights why we want as many operators from as many countries as possible. Hopefully we can create operator safety guides and best practice guides for operating on the ground!
The concept of Proof Of Cause came from this idea that operators would go on the ground and investigate in fact we originally called it proof of human work.
We will ensure our platform has the functionality to allow operators to add this kind of detail with the information being stored on our Archive nodes.
Yeah, the more operators we have, the better! I totally agree that we have to create safety guides.
We could also have a virtual training with new operators. But, I’m not sure how sustainable training each operator will be in the long run considering the number of operators we plan to have.