Derek Lubner had one simple request for the non-profits his family foundation supported: send a photo showing what the money bought. Cricket bats, a classroom, a new soccer field. Just a picture. Over the years, he estimates that barely a quarter of organisations ever followed through, leaving him with no real way to confirm whether the work had actually happened.
Lubner was managing his late parents' foundation, Make an Immediate Difference, when the pattern became impossible to ignore. Rather than cutting funding to organisations that missed his compliance requests, he started asking a different question. What if the problem wasn't dishonesty but administrative overwhelm? Frontline social workers running lean community programmes are not always equipped to meet the reporting standards that formal donors expect, and that gap, he realised, was quietly cutting legitimate organisations out of funding pipelines.
That frustration became the founding logic behind iZinga Assist, a digital non-profit verification and support platform he co-founded with chief executive Henk Swanepoel. The platform digitally checks NGOs' documentation and offers resources to help them close administrative gaps. Because registration alone does not tell a donor whether an organisation is active, well-governed, or accountable, iZinga Assist aims to give donors reliable data before they commit funding, while also making it easier for grassroots groups to meet the standards donors require.
Lubner put it plainly to TechCabal: "I could have blamed the organisations and cut their funding. Instead, I realised we needed to help them meet those compliance requirements." The question now is whether a digital platform can do what decades of goodwill alone could not, and finally close the gap between community leaders doing real work and the donors trying to find them.
Originally published by TechCabal.