How Might Blockchain Technology Support The Charity Commission And Department For International Development (DFID) Initiatives to Improve Safeguarding Standards in the Charities Sector?

John Reynolds
8 min readMar 27, 2018

A 90 minute Service Design Workshop looking at the selection, engagement and deployment of aid workers in responding to disasters and the potential of Blockchain Technology to help overcome some of the current barriers to safeguarding and rapid mobilisation.

Participants

The Service Design Workshop was part of a wider Charities Working Group meet-up hosted by Bond (the UK network for organisations working in international development) at their offices in London on Thursday 22nd March 2018.

The overall workshop looked at 3 different sector challenges and was facilitated by a team from Blockchain Digital.

This post relates to the 2nd challenge focused on the selection, engagement and deployment of aid workers in responding to disasters, the group exploring this challenge had representatives from Bond and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) with a principle focus on safeguarding and process standardisation and improvement.

Process

The Group followed the Blockchain Digital Service Design process which is based on IDEO Human Centre Design and the UK Design Councils Double Diamond Design Process.

New Service Objective

Creating a system that would provide charities with access to a shared & validated candidates list when building aid worker teams for deployment in to disaster situations — thereby enabling increased vetting and referencing of candidates and reducing time taken for getting the right aid team on the ground .

Service Users

Given the restricted time for the workshop the group decided to focus on a single service user:

Service User Jobs To Be Done

The following main tasks were identified for Carol the Recruitment Manager:

Receive a resource requirements list from the charity’s first respondent on the ground.

Identify available aid workers with appropriate qualifications, experience, skill sets and performance history — prioritise key skills groups. Establish a aid worker candidates list and set up interviews.

Interview each candidate, perform vetting and reference checks to validate skills; qualifications, performance history and character (to the extent possible) and any passport or visa requirements.

Select preferred candidates, make offers of engagement, receive acceptances and arrange transport, visas and briefings.

Inform all stakeholders of date / time of aid team’s arrival.

Service User Challenges

The charities’ first respondent at the disaster zone will assess the immediate needs and specify the size and nature of the team of aid workers to be deployed to site — the Recruitment Manager or Project Manager will build and mobilise the team.

Mobilisation challenges include large turnover of staff in the charities sector; new starters having fragmented networks with limited visibility of available aid worker candidates and credentials including qualifications, experience, passport and visa status, inoculation history. This is exacerbated by lack of data sharing between agencies resulting in inadequate capabilities for vetting individual records of performance and behaviour including proven or suspect offenders or abusers.

This hinders the end-to-end contact, engagement and deployment process and leads to an increased risk of exploitation by offenders and delay in deploying appropriate aid workers on the ground.

Despite the time pressure to respond quickly in times of great need, there is an overriding requirement for the most appropriate aid workers to be deployed to establish and maintain trust with communities within the disaster zone and to ensure the reputations values of the charities are adhered to.

This is difficult as aid workers can he highly mobile and personnel data is not generally shared between organisations so selection can be ‘a bit of a lottery’ — the values and behaviours that charities want their representatives to embody can be at risk / compromised due to the lack of available vetting data.

The group did not have time to fully analyse data regulations as the apply to various data sets, this will be to be conducted as a follow on activity, however, various data regulations will apply across jurisdictions, including GDPR.

Service Context

In this section the group were challenged to identify trends, barriers and regulations that would impact the future service

Trend — Increasingly, people are donating to charities that have good reputations, are transparent and accountable.

Trend Establishing and maintaining trust is paramount. The media is increasingly proactive in reporting instances of aid worker wrong-doing; aid sector sexual exploitation allegations proliferate.

TrendSafeguarding support for NGOs — working with members, governments and regulatory bodies to ensure organisations are equipped to prevent sexual exploitation across the national & international development sector.

Trend — Organisations working towards a greater level of process standardisation including recent calls to enable aid organisations to accelerate the mobilisation of appropriately skilled respondents to reduce the impact of disasters.

Regulations — General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introducing new requirements for how organisations, including charities, process personal data.

BarrierInternal Systems Guardians and lack of data sharing between agencies and government bodies.

Barrier Lack of robust business processes for capturing and recording aid workers’ performance records driving difficulty in identifying individuals with poor performance and behaviour records and known or suspected offenders.

Barrier — fragmented support for working towards standardising business process and / or common performance levels or codes of conduct including agency vetting and referencing and management of reported incidents or concerns and engagement of appropriate Authorities.

Barrier — human rights / data regulations will complicate or prevent recording and sharing instances of inappropriate aid worker behaviour.

Outcomes

The group identified the following as key outcomes the service needs to deliver:

Cultural shift towards a greater level of cross-organisational collaboration — working together and sharing key data, including working with international bodies establishing best practices including safeguarding.

Greater ability to prevent exploitation via improved visibility and vetting of aid worker performance history — Safeguarding the dignity and wellbeing of those that need aid most.

Improved response time — accelerated aid worker deployment on the ground — more lives saved.

A common information management system as an enabler for establishing trust, data sharing, collaboration, and ensuring successful adoption of emerging safeguarding standards.

Improved confidence in aid worker candidate selection — reputation protection.

Trust established throughout the multi-party network via controlled and permissioned access.

Aid workers individually taking accountability for maintaining performance history and continuity of references.

Other outcomes include multi-party collaboration with instant access to a validated aid worker candidate list including performance and behaviour data as a key input to safeguarding; reducing the risk of exploitation, cost reduction, multi-party response co-ordination and greater utilisation of higher-performing workers with positive employment histories.

Benefits

The ultimate benefit of the service is that it will enable Charites, Regulators and Department For International Development (DFID) to accelerate the safe mobilisation of teams on the ground by driving up safeguarding standards in the sector therefore increasing the positive impact and timeliness of support provided to vulnerable people and communities.

Business Network & Actors

At this stage of the workshop we were running out of time so could just fit in a very quick pass at mapping the business network; Human Resource Managers, Project Managers, first responders (Impact Assessors), collaborating peer organisations, prospective aid workers, emergency teams on the ground, local country partners, home government, overseas government (including visa office), regulator, Department for International Development and parties tasked with driving adoption of best practices.

Service Value Proposition

The new Service will be a cross-sector service that will enable a greater level of collaboration and sharing of data as a key enabler to standardised business processes, improved levels of safeguarding and to accelerate the mobilisation of appropriately skilled respondents to reduce the impact of disasters.

Collectively, this will strengthen public trust and confidence in the good work of the charities sector, drive improved value for money donations by enabling a reduction of common back-office costs.

Blockchain Pointers

Strong pointers in favour of using Blockchain technology as a solution includes circumstances where: 1) there are requirements for multiple parties to share data and update data 2) There are requirements for verification of data and / or actors within a process 3) An intermediary provides a service today 4) an intermediary can be removed to reduce cost and complexity. The group was asked to consider these pointers in relation to the new service.

Blockchain Solution Fit

There are requirements for multiple distributed parties to establish trust and share data (National, International, Agencies, Government, Regulators, Aid Workers), and update data.

There are requirements for establishing common working practices between actors within a process, for verification of data and for some records to be immutable or at least only changed by majority consensus.

There is a complex intermediary landscape today.

The group decided there was a strong pointer towards blockchain technology being able to support many of the key service requirements.

Blockchain Solutions — Early Ideation

The Group had a very limited amount for time for ideating on solutions, but the following observations and ideas were shared.

A permissioned consortium blockchain would best fit for the requirements for example Hyperledger, Corda, Multichain or Enterprise Ethereum, with the use of smart contracts to support the drive towards process standardisation.

One idea that was explored was the concept of a distributed consortium positive reputation type platform — effectively a ‘private charities sector aid worker and casual labour Linkedin

Next Steps

This use case will be shared with the sector Collaborative Requirements Register, discussed with the Charities Working Group and wider Community (now over 100 members) to see if there is an interest in taking this use case to a proof of concept. Thoughts, comments and feedback most welcome.

Charities Working Group

The Working Group was inspired by Sir Mark Walport’s ground‐breaking Distributed Ledger Technology: Beyond Blockchain and the call to action in the Lord Holmes of Richmond’s Distributed Ledger Technologies for Public Good: leadership, collaboration and innovation, for sectors to come together and explore the benefits of DLT.

The Charities Working Group Community was formed as an Open Collaboration Community that welcomes Charities, Regulators, Donors, Technology Providers, Academics and Citizens to provide a space for all those interested in exploring the benefits of Blockchain and DLT to join in a Charities sector collaborative effort, to collectively consider how these new capabilities might help charities make a bigger impact on the lives of the communities and people they seek to serve.

The Community is supported by an overarching steering group that feeds community ideas, insights and requests back into the work of the UK Government APPG on Blockchain. Working group members include Bond, Charites Aid Foundation, Islamic Relief Worldwide, Overseas Development Agency, Blockchain for Good, Blockchain Digital and BBFA.

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