A platform that began as a 'wedding registry for aid' goes global

Within days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 21-year-old Kyrylo Lapko got in a van with his father to buy and deliver supplies for people who’d lost their sources of food, clean water, and electricity. He soon observed a dynamic that plays out in humanitarian crises around the world: Well-intentioned donations from individuals and large donor agencies often do not match needs on the ground. Meanwhile, extensive needs assessments and lengthy procurement processes lead to long delays in aid delivery. Now, nearly a year into the conflict in Ukraine with 17.7 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, Lapko is the country’s program manager behind RespondLocal, an online aid marketplace that matches the needs of local organizations with offers of supplies from corporate donors and international organizations. Launched in Ukraine last month, RespondLocal is helping groups access what people need — which this winter includes blankets, stoves, and generators — but also what they want, with many requests for tea and sweets. “It’s an opportunity to see real-time humanitarian needs all across the country and to match them in just one click,” Lapko told Devex. The platform is developed by NeedsList, a public benefit corporation that creates software to coordinate crisis response. Its RespondLocal platform creates logistics information, such as locations and quantities of needs, then matched organizations work together to get the aid delivered. Donors have offered some $1.8 million in aid via the platform so far, claimable by local organizations, and more than 163,000 units of aid have gone to local Ukrainian organizations since mid-December. The idea for NeedsList came in 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe, when co-founder Natasha Freidus repurposed wedding registry software to match the needs of Syrian refugee families in France with donors in real time. Its model became known as a “wedding registry for humanitarian aid.” Since then, NeedsList has evolved into a crisis response platform that has been used in numerous crises worldwide. It licenses its software to businesses, INGOs, and other suppliers so they can aggregate and match the needs of grassroots organizations. NeedsList is working to respond to a massive problem: 60 to 80% of aid-sector funding is spent on logistics alone. Since its founding, NeedsList has delivered $20 million of aid to local communities across 25 countries, with backing from the United States Agency for International Development and partnerships with groups including Field Ready and Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. Now, for the first time, NeedsList is offering a specialized version of its RespondLocal software at no cost to users. With support from Google.org, including a $1 million grant and pro bono technological support, NeedsList has upgraded its platform and is rolling out a free version of NeedsList — first in Ukraine, then in Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, Peru, and Colombia. Its goal is to expand RespondLocal globally. Building an online aid marketplace When NeedsList was founded in 2016, it allowed front-line workers to use an online platform to communicate needs to donors and other partners. “When you give people the opportunity to ask for what they want, you’re treating someone like a human again, and not just like a recipient of aid.” --— Kat Sellers, chief strategy officer, NeedsList Co-founders Freidus and Amanda Levinson initially posted refugees’ needs on Facebook. Then they started to pitch the idea of a management tool that organizations could use to understand and meet the needs of communities displaced by poverty, conflict, and climate change. Over time, the company has shifted from connecting individuals to connecting organizations, which it does through RespondLocal, said Kat Sellers, NeedsList’s chief strategy officer. RespondLocal emerged in 2019, in the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas. USAID partnered with NeedsList to streamline the process of getting private sector donations to the affected population. This gave the company the boost it needed to build RespondLocal as enterprise software that can be “white labeled,” meaning that other organizations customize it and brand it as their own. RespondLocal has been put to the test in a variety of settings — from the resettling of Ukrainian, Afghan, and Venezuelan refugees in the United States, to the delivery of locally made COVID-19 personal protective equipment for refugee health care workers in Kenya, Uganda, Iraq, and Bangladesh. In most contexts, NeedsList has operated as a software provider as opposed to an implementer. One donor funds the software license and program implementation on the ground, which is carried out by other groups, with NeedsList providing technical support and training. In Ukraine, Google.org is acting as the funder, with NeedsList managing program implementation — a model that will be replicated with the new, free new version. NeedsList has headquarters in Durham, North Carolina and Toronto, Ontario. Whenever NeedsList enters a new geography, it starts by identifying organizations across different domains, from health to education; inviting them to join the platform; training them; and then encouraging them to post what they need. “What we’ve found is that local communities are often in a position to support themselves and each other, and to network like this,” Sellers said. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, NeedsList had funding that was earmarked for personal protective equipment. But they heard from organizations working in Bidi Bidi refugee settlement in northwestern Uganda that girls needed sanitary products so they could go to school. So NeedsList was able to secure funding from the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office to buy 30,000 reusable menstrual pads from Smart Girls Foundation, a nonprofit in Uganda. “It’s a flip” of the traditional humanitarian aid model, Sellers said. “People come to us and tell us what they need,” instead of organizations distributing what they assume people need. Improving the platform The charitable arm of Google, Google.org, which connects nonprofit innovators with Google resources, announced last June that it would support NeedsList to build a free, public version of its software and scale the technology, starting in Ukraine. Google.org supported NeedsList to prepare the platform for its deployment in Ukraine by strengthening security features, supporting translation across five languages, and streamlining the platform. Ahead of its launch in Ukraine on December 14, NeedsList worked with organizations to beta test the technology, including Team4UA, a humanitarian foundation founded in Poland operating in Ukraine. “Needslist opens for us an opportunity to provide humanitarian aid based on actual needs, not current availability,” said Jean-Christophe Bonis, founder of Team4UA. In addition to the $1 million grant, a team of seven Google.org engineers worked on the RespondLocal project full time for six months as part of a Google.org fellowship, said Jen Carter, global head of technology at Google.org. Google.org was drawn to NeedsList’s record of working in other locations, along with modifications they had made based on learnings in those markets and the company’s potential to scale. “They needed to have more site reliability engineering work to ensure that the product could keep up with the demand, that it wouldn’t crash,” said Carter, offering one example of the improvements her colleagues made. Preparing to scale NeedsList is gathering feedback from partner organizations in Ukraine as it prepares to roll out the specialized free version of RespondLocal in East Africa and Latin America later this month. The small team of eight will have to manage the free deployment of the software, which means outreach, vetting, onboarding, and administrative work. The biggest challenge NeedsList will face as the company scales is finding leaders like Lapko to implement the technology locally and ensure that both suppliers and recipients are vetted. “We get as many organizations as possible on the platform, they post their needs, and then I take that information and I go do a money dance for donors,” Sellers said. Requests include essential needs, but also comforts. For example, in refugee settlements in Uganda, there are a lot of requests for footballs. “We forget that people are people. And people also want stuff they want and not just stuff they need. And just because somebody is in a situation of conflict or crisis doesn’t mean they don’t deserve joy,” Sellers said. “When you give people the opportunity to ask for what they want, you’re treating someone like a human again, and not just like a recipient of aid.” Update Jan. 20, 2023: This story clarifies the amount of money that has been donated via RespondLocal so far in Ukraine.