I'm a one-person NGO. And I have to do everything from my actual mission of helping my beneficiaries, getting them medicine, getting them services, getting them information, to accounting, grant application, crowdfunding, reporting, everything. I've been active in the field for over 10 years and have never had an application before. Not a website, not a database. This has meant I have never had the ability to collect donations or keep in touch with my volunteers. They seem like basic needs and yet most of the time people don't realise how hard it is for an NGO to solve these problems and become sustainable. I now use Code for Romania's free Website Factory and Redirect, and most recently I use Paul, my new colleague. I don't feel alone anymore.

Alina Dumitriu, Sens Pozitiv

The last few years bore witness to how critical NGOs are in delivering relief and in driving the fight for solutions in our multi-crises world.

Civil society organizations are carrying the burden of public service all over the world. In the best of scenarios, they share this burden with those governmental bodies open to cooperation and true to their mission of serving the public. Unfortunately, in most of the world, they are truly alone in ensuring public services, community organization, and the fight for access to the most basic needs and rights in places where there is no governmental capacity or where the government itself is the problem.

The NGO sector is the most critical and yet the most vulnerable sector of our society. The crises of today are making it even more critical and even more vulnerable. Technology can solve both the capacity and the scaling conundrum of civil society. However, in the race for digitization civil society is being left behind. It is too poor of a sector to attract the attention of the private market and lacks both the knowledge and the capacity to design, deploy and maintain the technology it needs itself.