After many years 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 think about the request and agree to fund all or a part of it. His solely situation was that the organisation ship him {a photograph} displaying what the cash had paid for.
Over the years, he estimates that hardly 1 / 4 of the organisations ever despatched the requested footage, leaving him with no simple method to affirm whether or not the tools had been bought or the venture delivered.
For somebody devoted to supporting grassroots group initiatives throughout South Africa, the omission was irritating. Yet it additionally compelled him to rethink the executive burden conventional donors impose on frontline social employees.
“I could have blamed the organisations and cut their funding,” Lubner informed 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 presents assets to assist them tackle administrative gaps. The purpose is twofold: give donors dependable information earlier than deploying capital, and forestall administrative paperwork from locking professional group leaders out of funding pipelines.
Lubner had seen first-hand that an organisation will be passionately rooted in its group 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 almost three many years in civil society, together with a board seat at Mothers2Mothers since its inception in 2001. Founded in Cape Town through the top of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the maternal well being organisation pairs moms dwelling with HIV with pregnant ladies confronting new diagnoses, offering frontline steerage on remedy adherence and little one safety.
The organisation demonstrated how social intervention succeeds when constructed round lived expertise and backed by professionalised techniques. Notably, Mothers2Mothers insisted on formally using its mentor moms moderately than counting on unpaid volunteer labour, whereas resisting mission creep regardless of persistent donor stress to chase unrelated grants.
Managing his household’s portfolio of 35 to 40 native non-profits offered the complementary funder’s perspective.
It made clear that the power reporting failures he witnessed had been not often 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 through 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 turn 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 pointers, and direct teaching.
Onboarding and verification stay utterly free for applicant organisations, a deliberate alternative to guarantee restricted money reserves don’t forestall professional 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 data or really feel apprehensive about disclosing inner 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 data 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 searching for assist and donors who want confidence in how their cash might be used. That contains South Africans dwelling overseas who need to assist causes at dwelling however might battle to determine credible organisations.
He envisages donors having the ability to determine causes they care about and obtain updates in line with their preferences. Someone in sport, for instance, may assist a group cricket programme and obtain affirmation that tools bought with their donation reached the meant organisation.
The platform is exploring methods to make that course of simpler to observe, together with cost preparations that might affirm when cash has been spent on an agreed merchandise. In one mannequin Lubner describes, an NGO may use a cost card to buy one thing particular, equivalent 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 is just not synonymous with lasting group transformation.
“‘Impact’ is a term thrown around casually, but its definition varies wildly,” he defined. A group initiative would possibly 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’t 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 at present 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 evaluations affirm statutory registration and company governance, however they can’t show that an organisation is actively operating the clinics or meals kitchens it claims. The platform’s forthcoming five-star score index may have to clearly disclose the place documentary verification ends and bodily validation begins.
To resolve this, Lubner is courting business banks and company donors to mobilise their workforce for volunteer subject visits. Properly skilled company volunteers may carry out periodic on-site spot-checks, offering donor validation whereas connecting company personnel immediately with native communities.
Lubner insists accountability have to be mutual. Donors should talk their metrics with readability moderately 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 mentioned. “We need symmetry in that relationship.”
Achieving platform sustainability is the following operational take a look at. 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 mentioned. 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 many years in the past as a quest for lacking pictures has expanded into an bold structural intervention. Lubner is trying 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 will probably command the identical institutional credibility it’s asking South Africa’s non-profits to show.
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