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RealtimeAid supports local organisations in conflict areas to run community projects ranging from learning centres for special needs children, sports classes for traumatised young people and refurbishing former ISIS prisons to turn them into safe play spaces for youth and women.
RealtimeAid takes on the due diligence, finance and monitoring and evaluation functions for the ten projects. The aim being to lesson the administrative burden and bureaucracy inherent to the international aid sector to allow excellent projects to flourish.
All of these organisations are very young, with most having been set-up in the last five years in the midst of an ongoing war. This means experience in working in international aid structures and seeing an organisation evolve over time is limited, whilst the need for community led, grassroots projects is desperate.
RealtimeAid recognises the unique needs of each community organisation working to support based on the needs of each entity. This includes support with budgets, data management, dealing with international due diligence requirements, and internalising those processes into an organisationās capacity through a range of tech based tools.
RealtimeAid uses decentralised decision making and a network model to ensure a method of working that fits with the spirit of localisation of aid.
Frequently asked questions about RealtimeAid Projects and Methodology
What is decentralised decision making?
ReatlimeAid aims to have decisions made by the Users of aid and not by the donors. This can be problematic as often decisions are made by locally based power groups, such as men, or elites. Decentralised decision making is a way of making decisions through collecting different points of data from different Users and then correlating that data. We also use technological tools to help us keep a transparent record of how all data was collected and to analyse those data. Essentially there is no one person or group who decides on everything.
What is a network method of aid?
RealtimeAid works with community nodes - local Changemakers - who are access points to other community members who then create further links to other nodes and more groups. This network effect means that projects are locally owned via various networks, and also needs and issues are identified by those same networks.
Why is localisation of aid necessary?
Less than 2% of all international aid makes it to local people, this makes for an inefficient system with much desperately needed money wasted. Added to this the aid sector is highly bureaucratic, lacks in accountability with a lack of trust built into all processes. International fora such as the Grand Bargain of 2016 has also committed major aid organisations to change the current architecture of aid.
What makes RealtimeAid different from other aid organistions?
RealtimeAidās uniqueness lies in leadership, our approach and the fact that we are testing out our model and iterating it live in contexts of conflict. Our promise is to drive through a new approach based on an ethical obligation. That approach has been designed bottom-up, it combines a process of working with local people as well as tech to ensure that all the pain points of the current aid system are usefully solved for all involved - both Users of Aid and Donors.
Qadar Organisation