After a long time in philanthropy, Derek Lubner found that giving cash was easy; verifying the place it went was the true problem. In dialog with PHATHISANI MOYO, the iZinga Assist co-founder explains how he plans to restore the trust deficit between donors and grassroots NGOs.
When Derek Lubner was managing his late mother and father’ basis, Make an Immediate Difference, he routinely requested beneficiary non-profit organisations to submit want lists for the upcoming 12 months.
If an organisation needed cricket bats and nets, a classroom or a soccer subject, the co-founder and chairman of iZinga Assist, digital non-profit verification and support platform, would take into account the request and agree to fund all or a part of it. His solely situation was that the organisation ship him {a photograph} exhibiting what the cash had paid for.
Over the years, he estimates that hardly 1 / 4 of the organisations ever despatched the requested photos, leaving him with no easy means to affirm whether or not the tools had been bought or the mission delivered.
For somebody devoted to supporting grassroots neighborhood initiatives throughout South Africa, the omission was irritating. Yet it additionally pressured him to rethink the executive burden conventional donors impose on frontline social employees.
“I could have blamed the organisations and cut their funding,” Lubner advised TechCabal. “Instead, I realised we needed to help them meet those compliance requirements.”
That conviction spurred the creation of iZinga Assist, co-founded with chief govt Henk Swanepoel. The digital platform was designed to make grassroots non-profits extra seen, structurally sound, and simpler for donors to vet.
In a sector where registration alone doesn’t set up whether or not an organisation is lively, well-governed or accountable for its funding, the platform digitally checks NGOs’ documentation and provides sources to assist them deal with administrative gaps. The aim is twofold: give donors dependable knowledge earlier than deploying capital, and forestall administrative paperwork from locking reliable neighborhood leaders out of funding pipelines.
Lubner had seen first-hand that an organisation could be passionately rooted in its neighborhood whereas remaining ill-equipped to meet the rigorous reporting requirements demanded by institutional philanthropists.
Learning to look past the donation
Lubner’s perspective had been formed by practically three a long time in civil society, together with a board seat at Mothers2Mothers since its inception in 2001. Founded in Cape Town in the course of the peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the maternal well being organisation pairs moms residing with HIV with pregnant girls confronting new diagnoses, offering frontline steering on therapy adherence and little one safety.
The organisation demonstrated how social intervention succeeds when constructed round lived expertise and backed by professionalised methods. Notably, Mothers2Mothers insisted on formally using its mentor moms relatively than counting on unpaid volunteer labour, whereas resisting mission creep regardless of persistent donor strain to chase unrelated grants.
Managing his household’s portfolio of 35 to 40 native non-profits supplied the complementary funder’s perspective.
It made clear that the continual reporting failures he witnessed had been hardly ever acts of fraud; they had been signs of extreme under-resourcing. Small social initiatives merely lacked the executive bandwidth to produce institutional-grade documentation.
That realisation knowledgeable the event of iZinga Assist in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than penalising under-staffed groups, the platform was conceived as an operational scaffold to assist them construction their governance and develop into investor-ready.
“We wanted to shine a light on the under-served tier of the sector,” Lubner defined. “The objective is to make these organisations both verified and visible to prospective funders.”
Making organisations simpler to trust
To safe verification, iZinga Assist requires non-profits to add roughly 20 statutory paperwork spanning founding constitutions, board charters, tax compliance, and audited monetary statements. Where documentation is lacking or insufficient, the platform provides standardised contract templates, governance tips, and direct teaching.
Onboarding and verification stay utterly free for applicant organisations, a deliberate selection to guarantee restricted money reserves don’t stop reliable teams from demonstrating compliance.
“NGO leaders often do not know what they do not know,” Lubner famous. “We try to lift that administrative burden, including by maintaining a secure cloud repository for their files so they are always audit-ready.”
According to Lubner, the platform has onboarded greater than 500 organisations, with roughly 110 reaching full verification. Completing the audit usually takes months and even years, as many grassroots groups both have incomplete information or really feel apprehensive about disclosing inside books.
South Africa’s non-profit register supplies a depend of registered organisations, however registration alone doesn’t set up whether or not an organisation stays lively, maintains its information or delivers the work described in its founding paperwork. The scale of the sector makes that distinction essential.
iZinga Assist cited 289,852 organisations on the Department of Social Development’s register at the end of September 2025 and Trialogue’s estimate of R13.1 billion ($797.8 million) in company social funding spending in 2025. Those figures describe the broader sector, not funds verified or tracked by iZinga Assist.
For Lubner, the chance is to shut the data hole between organisations looking for help and donors who want confidence in how their cash will probably be used. That contains South Africans residing overseas who need to help causes at house however could wrestle to establish credible organisations.
He envisages donors having the ability to establish causes they care about and obtain updates in line with their preferences. Someone in sport, for instance, may help a neighborhood cricket programme and obtain affirmation that tools bought with their donation reached the supposed organisation.
The platform is exploring methods to make that course of simpler to observe, together with fee preparations that would affirm when cash has been spent on an agreed merchandise. In one mannequin Lubner describes, an NGO may use a fee card to buy one thing particular, akin to cricket bats, with the donor receiving affirmation of the transaction.
The goal is to exchange philanthropic guesswork with verifiable paper trails. Yet Lubner readily concedes that proof of transaction shouldn’t be synonymous with lasting neighborhood transformation.
“‘Impact’ is a term thrown around casually, but its definition varies wildly,” he defined. A neighborhood initiative may miss an arbitrary numerical goal due to unexpected native unrest or climate occasions with out rendering its underlying mission invalid.
That distinction is significant: {a photograph} of soccer balls confirms procurement; it can not decide whether or not youth delinquency declined or whether or not sports activities participation improved psychological well being. A reputable verification mechanism should clearly delineate administrative compliance from long-term social efficacy.
Building trust with out creating one other barrier
iZinga Assist faces its personal verification problem: no exterior regulator presently audits its proprietary methodology, and distant doc checks don’t substitute for on-the-ground inspection.
“Donors have to place confidence in our vetting, and we recognise that scrutinising our own credibility is a fair demand,” Lubner acknowledged.
Digital doc opinions affirm statutory registration and company governance, however they can’t show that an organisation is actively working the clinics or meals kitchens it claims. The platform’s forthcoming five-star ranking index could have to clearly disclose the place documentary verification ends and bodily validation begins.
To clear up this, Lubner is courting industrial banks and company donors to mobilise their workforce for volunteer subject visits. Properly educated company volunteers may carry out periodic on-site spot-checks, offering donor validation whereas connecting company personnel straight with native communities.
Lubner insists accountability should be mutual. Donors should talk their metrics with readability relatively than imposing shifting reporting targets. “Too often, non-profits spray hundreds of proposals into the dark, while donors sit on capital because they cannot separate genuine operators from paper organisations,” he stated. “We need symmetry in that relationship.”
Achieving platform sustainability is the following operational check. As core verification will stay free for non-profits, iZinga Assist should monetise by licensing its vetting infrastructure to company CSI groups, philanthropic foundations, and wealth managers who require compliance-as-a-service.
“I am not looking to make a fortune from iZinga Assist; the goal is operational self-sufficiency,” Lubner stated. His five-year goal is to assemble an lively community of a number of thousand verified non-profits that use the portal to supply authorized templates, skilled improvement programs, vetted consultants, and verified funding leads.
What started a long time in the past as a quest for lacking pictures has expanded into an bold structural intervention. Lubner is making an attempt to rewire an opaque philanthropic sector the place well-intentioned donors and dedicated grassroots organisations stay divided by paperwork and mutual mistrust.
Whether iZinga Assist succeeds will rely not simply on the code it deploys or the paperwork it checks, however on whether or not it could command the identical institutional credibility it’s asking South Africa’s non-profits to show.
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