Charity — that’s where huge amounts of money is at. American charities command over $4 trillion in assets, and this figure has only been growing over time. Donations from both businesses and individuals are growing year after year, and yet, the industry continues to struggle with a multitude of problems that get in the way of achieving the ultimate goal: helping people in need. Until now this could only be mitigated with aggressive budget cuts — and this solution is not without its own problems.
Charities are much more complex than one may think. If you believe that donating $100 for a kid in a cancer ward you’re directly funding their costly medical bills, you’d be wrong in most cases. The fact of the matter is that a charity fund budget usually works as a huge money pool of donations that funds everything the charity does, be it actually delivering help or paying for its employees’ meals at the local restaurant. While it already sounds bad, the reality is often much worse.
The global standard for charities allows for up to 35% of donations to be spent on administrative costs: salaries, office rent, office equipment purchases and maintenance. To provide a recent example, the Red Cross raised some $500 million for new housing in Haiti a few years ago. The campaign was aimed to rebuild hundreds of homes destroyed by a terrible earthquake. What did the much-esteemed charity organization end up achieving? Just six houses were built, and simple math says that each of them cost over $80 million. That must be some luxury housing for one of the poorest countries in the world!
The American Red Cross is still far from the worst offender. Stories of charity fund CEOs writing hefty checks to themselves, or spending exorbitant amounts of money on “website operating costs” every year.
If one were to summarize the main issues of charities, the list would look something like this:
- Opaque cashflow. Donators have no way of knowing where their money goes.
- Huge delays. Donations take months and even years to be delivered as actual support.
- Scams galore. Unfortunately, scoundrels willing to profit off of human compassion are always on the prowl.
However, each of these problems can be addressed and even outright solved by introducing distributed ledger technology to the charity industry.
Blockchain shines the light on charities from the inside, making every transaction fully traceable, and this information is available anytime to anyone. Cryptocurrencies know no national borders, need no intermediaries to safely move funds, and above all, do it nearly instantly. No need for banking means yet another expense is gone.
Charities are, however, anything but simple, and implementing blockchain or crypto will take a considerable amount of time and effort. There is nothing wrong with that either — there are plenty of software integration companies out there ready to supply charities with tailored blockchain solutions.
Decentralized charity platform Humans Care Foundation (HCF) is being developed by a team with years of experience in building blockchain solutions for charity funds and community projects. The main goal of HCF is to raise funds for humanitarian causes via a fully transparent monetary allocation mechanism.
This approach fosters trust towards the charities thanks to the mechanism’s 100% transparency.
The HCF team is currently in close cooperation with multiple charity funds and NGOs working across Africa: Mozambique, Uganda, Senegal, Tanzania, Guinea, Conakry, Guinea-Bissau. The collaborative effort allows charities to efficiently deliver the help and support that people in need so desperately require.