Ellie Horvath
As the war in Ukraine escalates, humanitarian tech company Needslist is urgently launching an online platform to help local organisations swiftly access large-scale donations of warm clothes, generators, food and other fundamental items.
The UN estimates 17.7m people in Ukraine are in urgent need, with plummeting temperatures and mass power outages further fuelling the humanitarian crisis. The platform allows businesses, large international NGOs and other suppliers to matchmake with small grassroots organisations, through an online marketplace.
Google.org supported NeedsList with a $1m grant and a team of 7 Google Fellows – engineers who worked full-time for 6 months, to strengthen security features and translate the platform into five languages,
Since NeedsList launched, the RespondLocal platform has delivered more than $19m of aid, to over 500,000 beneficiaries across 25 countries, supporting the resettling of Afghan, Ukrainian and Venezuelan refugees in the USA, and delivering locally made COVID PPE to refugee health workers in Bangladesh, Iraq, Uganda and Kenya.
Kat Sellers, CSO at NeedsList
‘The crisis in Ukraine is deepening and we need to be dynamic in what is an increasingly volatile environment. RespondLocal is designed to assist faster, more sustainable humanitarian action – matching the biggest multilateral NGOs with the smallest grassroots organisation in real-time. We are hugely excited at the potential for this and grateful to the team at Google.org for making this a reality”.
Jen Carter, Global Head of Technology at Google.org: ‘With record numbers of people needing humanitarian aid across the world, it’s crucial that we provide aid in the most efficient way possible. Through a grant and a close pro-bono collaboration with the NeedsList team, the Google.org Fellows were able to help NeedsList build the Ukrainian instance of RespondLocal, a game-changing platform that will enable Needslist to support millions of Ukrainian people – including those still in Ukraine and those that have left for other European countries.’
All organisations who are onboarded are vetted through strict criteria to ensure donors and those receiving aid can have full confidence. Local organisations Team4UA and SpivDiia, have already delivered aid through the platform.
Kat continues, “We encourage every business, supplier or NGO interested in supporting the Ukraine response to get involved, whether through in-kind donations or funding, in order to ensure aid gets to those local organisations that need it most”.
To find out more or sign up please go to www.needslist.co
