Visualizing Aid for Community Response through Cooperative Networks

In 2019, 344 million people were impoverished or pushed further into poverty as a result of out-of-pocket health spending at the extreme poverty line (source: WHO 2023 UHC Monitoring Report). Although the WHO and other international institutions monitor impoverishing and catastrophic health spending (ICHS) as SDG-level goals, sustainably improving the situation for those struggling under such conditions is extremely challenging. People who are subject to ICHS are usually those who fall through the cracks of the established health system, as well as people the health system is entirely unable to reach, such as refugees or those affected by homelessness. This is most clearly seen during disasters and other times of crisis when existing weaknesses in health systems are further exacerbated, creating dire situations for communities such as disease outbreaks, loss of life, and other long-term health issues for its members.

Community centers and local grassroots organizations offer a critical lifeline for the medically underserved, maintaining a baseline level of health within a community that would not be possible without them. Importantly, they offer access to food, over-the-counter medicine and other essential items, as well as hygiene and sanitation services. In times of crisis, they provide rapid, cost-effective assistance in both emergency and post-emergency contexts. Furthermore, studies have shown that during crises, community-led initiatives and local organizations often outperform international NGOS (INGOS) in providing aid appropriate to the needs of the affected population. 

However, despite the critical role they play, grassroots and community-led organizations face systemic barriers that are reflective of challenges that exist in the wider ecosystem. Chief among these are: resources that are insufficient to cover the needs within a community; exclusion from and lack of visibility within higher level policy conversations; and the perception from policymakers that grassroots and community-led organizations are difficult to work and coordinate with at scale. 

These barriers directly impact the ability of community based organizations to  maintain health services and facilities for the most vulnerable in a community. Even when demonstrably high impact interventions are developed, limitations around funding and human capital restrict teams’ ability to analyze, maintain, and improve their services. Limited capacity to monitor, evaluate, and report on ongoing operations can create a sense that projects are being deliberately intransparent, which can then can damage trust with both the donors and the beneficiaries of such operations. Over time, as more people leave and knowledge is lost, these limitations end up affecting the sustainability and long-term potential of such operations, and a safety net that prevents ICHS disappears. 

The lack of comprehensive data on locally-led response at an aggregated level also creates corresponding gaps in academic research. The health and humanitarian sectors are then unable to incorporate the insights of community-led initiatives in a scalable way. This quickly becomes a negative spiral, as more attention is given to approaches that are backed by prominent studies that use well-populated data sets, and the resources that might have been invested into scaling local innovations and methods already proven to be effective are allocated away.

Boxtribute's vision is to transform the role grassroots organizations have within the larger health and humanitarian sectors through an embedded, bottom-up approach that enhances their visibility and supercharges their operations. Using our existing aid logistics system, which captures the day-to-day operational data of grassroots and community-led organizations, we are building out a platform to showcase their impact at a regional level while also enabling cooperative actions between participating members. Specifically, our platform allows organizations to look for available resources, such as medicine or other core relief items, in their list  of trusted partners in real time, as well as transfer those items directly into their stock lists.   We are adding data visualization capabilities to this so that information can be aggregated at a regional level, thereby creating a panoramic perspective of the resources in the network at large. This means that teams in need of additional support will be able to access live data on both availability (e.g., in stock supply of baby formula among their trusted partners) and delivery (e.g., recent beneficiary distributions in the area), making it possible to coordinate interventions with other community groups, as well as use that data to increase their visibility with policymakers, governmental institutions, and more. 

Unlike other solutions that have previously approached local and grassroots organizations with platform-based solutions, Boxtribute is unique in the way it integrates with teams at the operational level, supporting their existing workflow and targeting their most pressing pain points. By contrast, most other solutions require operational teams to perform additional tasks in order to onboard, such as collating and uploading data onto their platform, a painstaking process for already overstretched teams.

Once Boxtribute has been integrated into teams’ operational workflows, their day-to-day activities then start to generate data on their reach and impact in a very natural way. That data is then pre-processed by Boxtribute into actionable insights and user-friendly visualizations that are clear and easy to understand, a privilege previously reserved for large international entities with dedicated data analysis capabilities. Teams will then have the option of automatically publishing operational data (only non-personally identifiable information) publicly or to a selected list of trusted partners. This visibility not only promotes enhanced transparency across a wider support network, but also more egalitarian access to critical information needed for effective health delivery and crisis response, fostering greater accountability of community interventions as a whole.

Our solution works directly to alleviate hardships for people affected by impoverishing and catastrophic out-of-pocket health spending, especially individuals and families that do not otherwise have access to traditional health services, such as refugees and those affected by homelessness. Boxtribute’s current solution specializes in being able to run large-scale service delivery or aid distributions with a small team of either inexperienced or veteran personnel. This makes it possible for partner organizations to work in challenging contexts such as emergency or post-emergency relief, as well as areas the international community considers as failing states, and directly assist vulnerable individuals who often have no other means of health or livelihood support.

In a crisis context, rapid crisis response is a critical area of operations that has historically been difficult to manage, particularly for institutions like the UN and other international NGOs (INGOs) To quote the UN’s International Office of Migration (IOM), “immediately following crises, the provision of shelter and non-food items (NFI) assistance is a critical, life-saving intervention that provides the affected population with safety, protection from the elements, health risks and other factors that could increase their vulnerabilities.” Studies of previous UN and INGO led interventions have shown that it takes on average three months for core relief items to reach the field.  Boxtribute’s solution has been designed to be deployed quickly in the field even by people with no prior experience in aid delivery, and as a result can have an immediate effect on the lives of those affected by a crisis. 

Boxtribute’s solution has also been deployed for long-term community support in contexts as diverse as refugee camps in Greece and urban community centers in Rome. One example of how it can manage even the most challenging environments is the case of the Free Shop Lebanon (2021-present), who built their operations from the ground up with Boxtribute’s solution at the center. A UK registered charity, The Free Shop Lebanon supports over 500 families in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley region with a team of only four local residents. They have continued their operations throughout Lebanon’s financial crisis as well as Beirut’s port closure post explosion, and have been able to do so with a yearly budget of less than 50,000 GBP, demonstrating an exceptional level of efficiency in the humanitarian space. Aside from The Free Shop Lebanon, many of our other partners also choose to involve volunteers from the affected community in logistics and distribution work. All of this is only possible because the system is designed to be an easily accessible solution, therefore becoming a tool for inclusion and empowerment in those communities.

Boxtribute has a strong track record in successfully designing, launching, and scaling out community-focused tech-for-good products. Boxtribute’s existing aid logistics product started as a small hackathon prototype built inside a Greek refugee camp at the height of the 2016 crisis to try and manage the overwhelming volume of need. It is now a reliable software-as-a-service (SaaS) application that has supported over 25 organizations in different countries, and has been used in numerous crises, such as the Ukraine conflict, where Boxtribute was used to establish one of the largest support centers in Krakow for people fleeing Ukraine, and the Turkey-Syria earthquake, where grassroots teams used the platform to organize peer-to-peer transfers of supplies to local Syrian charities, whose received relatively less international aid support compared to their Turkish counterparts. To date, the solution has processed over 2.5 million items of aid goods and registered more than 41,000 beneficiaries.   

Within the project team, Boxtribute has domain expertise in both aid delivery and software product development. 80% of our organization has worked directly in the field delivering aid with both local grassroots and international organizations, including our Team Lead. Project members have over two years of experience working closely together on its logistics and aid management product, and have successfully managed to navigate many upheavals in the external environment during that time. An example of this is the Samos Aid Project, where after the 2020 mass riots and fires on the Greek islands, Boxtribute was able to ensure a continuous supply of aid in the face of the widespread pull-outs of charities in the region. Our solution was used in the main distributing center on Samos, and we supported the operational handover of that center between three different charities during this period. Among other things, this involved providing for the smooth transfer of inventory data while simultaneously maintaining beneficiary privacy, and keeping the management of all personally identifiable data (PII) separate.

We believe Boxtribute’s solution is at a mature pilot stage. This questionnaire defines the pilot stage as one where the solution has been launched in at least one community with 10 or more users, and the growth stage as a solution that is poised for large-scale expansion to multiple communities, with a consistent design and an established set of donors. Boxtribute’s solution has many attributes that are consistent with the growth stage, having been widely deployed to over 20 different geographic locations in both urban community centers and crisis hotspots. To date, we have registered more than 41,000 beneficiaries and distributed more than 2.5 million items. However, while we have demonstrated the solutions’ ability to scale and adapt to a diverse set of contexts, we believe there are more opportunities to refine the business model, optimize revenue streams, and reach new users and market segments.

We are applying to this program because we believe that as both an institution and as a network, it is an ideal partner for Boxtribute at our current stage of growth. Boxtribute has spent the last five years building up trust for both our team and our solution at the grassroots level, and are now at the point where we can sustain momentum and credibility in that sphere for the foreseeable future. However, we have ambitious goals centered around transforming how aid and other health services are delivered to the most vulnerable by changing the dynamics around how those decisions are made. For that to be possible, we need the support of not only the grassroots sector, but also researchers and policy makers at every level. 

Given this program’s expansive network in both the public and private space, its deep understanding of innovation, as well as the program’s connection to the university as a research institution, we believe you are an excellent fit for what Boxtribute is trying to achieve. We are looking for support not only on the funding side, but also for knowledge and advisory, including board expansion, as we move into the growth phase.

While some high profile INGOs, such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have their own cooperative platforms to assist with aid delivery operations, as a whole the health and humanitarian networks do not yet have a solution that holistically addresses the need for coordinated aid planning, much less empowerment at the local level. Other teams that have attempted to build multi-party participatory platforms in this space have generally failed to sustain them, mostly because they did not account for the core network effects that are key to success with participatory platforms: namely, a critical mass of adoption and regular engagement, and how that in turn is dependent on how well integrated platform usage is with users’ normal activities. By comparison, Boxtribute already has a critical mass of users in its partner network and has clear plans of how to more deeply integrate the solution into their operational workflow, targeting their most pressing pain points to build team capacity and free up their time. This is possible because Boxtribute has an established track record and strong credibility among the target users of the platform. We are unique in our approach of combining both a cooperative platform and a digital operational solution into a single product.

Beneficiary Impact

Goal: Partners have better insight into beneficiary populations (and are better able to meet their needs), Measure: increasing year-on-year weekly engagement with Boxtribute’s visualization capabilities by 25%.

Milestone: Increase weekly usage of Boxtribute and integrations with distributing organizations year-on-year by 30%.

Milestone: Produce two new reports/visualizations of beneficiary populations by year end

Availability of Aid Supply

Goal: Increase the amount of aid supply items moved through our systems. Target: +120,000 items year on year

Goal: Ensure that the data we have on hand and are displaying to partner organizations is accurate and actionable. Measure: Percentage of aid supply items across all Boxtribute organizations available for real-time consolidation and analysis 

Boxtribute is an open-source* web-based logistics solution that makes sure the right aid gets to the right people at the right time. Created by aid workers for aid workers, it covers the flow of aid from NGO warehouses, through distributions to end beneficiaries, and is designed for quick deployment in the field with either inexperienced or veteran personnel. While it takes months to configure traditional supply chain solutions, Boxtribute can be implemented within a week. Current capabilities include:

• Simplified Inventory Management: A QR code and box based system that can be used even by inexperienced, high-turnover teams to keep track of what and where items are stored in a scalable way.

• Data Visualizations on Aid Availability and Operations: Similar to classic social networks, organizations on the platform can agree to link with each other either permanently or for a set time (i.e., for the duration of a crisis). Once linked, they will be able to see currently available supplies, as well as some distribution information (fully anonymized) at an aggregated level.

• Seamless Inventory Transfer: When local organizations wish to transfer health supplies and other items to each other, they have the option on the platform of creating a shipment with a connected organization. After a shipment is created, receiving teams can see upstream aid at the product-item level as a shipment is being packed. Once the shipment is delivered, sending teams also have real-time visibility of aid as it is reconciled and registered in the inventory system of recipient organizations. 

• Beneficiary Management: A database to register beneficiaries with support for families, including population-level analytics and visualizations. 

• Free Shop Style Dignified Distributions: Supports a free shop style distribution experience that is more dignified than traditional handouts where beneficiaries are given the option to choose what they need for themselves. The platform supports a checkout functionality to record which items beneficiaries have chosen, including the use of electronic tokens that beneficiaries can "spend" in the free shop.

Operationally, Google App Engine hosts our SaaS solution, and analytics tools like Heap are used to track user engagement and proactively identify product improvements.

*Our source code is fully open source and hosted on Github (see: https://github.com/boxwise/boxtribute and https://github.com/boxwise/dropapp [legacy stack]). Technologies we use include: Python/Flask, ReactJS (TypeScript), GraphQL (Apollo Client, Ariadne), MySQL, and PHP (legacy stack only). 

Our solution’s first prototype was built in 2016 (8 years ago) in the Nea Kavala refugee camp in Greece, and existed before the establishment of the organization. The organization was established in 2019 (5 years ago) with the support of our team lead with the objective to address systemic gaps that prevented vulnerable people from receiving the aid they need through capacity building. Our team lead has been involved in the project since 2019, and has been instrumental in evolving that prototype into the solution that exists today.

Our current business model is to provide software-as-a-service (SaaS) access to our open source logistics product under a flexible "pay-what-you-can" plan for charitable organizations with a budget of <1 million EUR. This approach has been received positively, manifesting in a steady annual revenue growth of 15%-30%. By early 2023, our product achieved operational breakeven using that approach alone, and now successfully covers its expenses through said revenue model without relying on supplemental funds from donations. New developments and extensions of the product are funded primarily through grant donations and other awards, which are often put together in collaboration with local grassroots partners whose focus is field operations.

Although we successfully achieved operational breakeven in 2023, we would like to capitalize on our positive momentum to accelerate our technical development, boost our organizational health, and amplify our impact. To do this, we plan to focus on continuing to increase our adoption rate to bolster our long-term financial sustainability. In particular, we see great untapped potential in collaborating with governmental entities responsible for community health, aid response, and disaster management. Such collaborations could unlock public funds as a supplementary revenue stream; if successful, we would like to see some of that also be passed on to our field partners. In the long run, we aspire to be part of the solution that bridges the significant financing shortfall observed in international aid ($22 billion USD in 2022), which allows us to envisage receiving a small allocation of global humanitarian aid funds ($29.7 billion USD in 2022) as a revenue source.