EnlightAID

Achieving the SDGs by 2030 is estimated by the UN to cost between $5 to $7 trillion per year. A significant portion of those resources must be allocated towards environmental protection. However, 30% of the resources donated globally to achieve these goals never reach their intended destination, they are lost to corruption. As nothing can be achieved if the services, goods and resources the goals implicitly require never reach their intended destinations, ending corruption is essential.

Corruption is largely caused by lack of transparency. While data regarding flows of funding allocation, cross-border transfers and on-the-ground expenses remain inaccessible to the public, resources will continue to be misappropriated.

EnlightAID aims to solve this problem by providing critical transparency through real-time visualization of the use of donations. Our platform shows where, when and on what funds are used. By replacing end-of-the-year reports with real-time reporting incentives for misbehaviour will be significantly reduced.

Our goal is to provide scalable and verifiable monitoring and data about productivity of projects which aim to help communities restore and sustain resilient ecosystems. Specifically, their performance in terms of financial resource allocation. As many of these projects depend on donations our aim is to first scale up donation monitoring. Even though there is no global consolidated statistic on donations, the US, Australia, the UK, Switzerland, Russia and China combined contribute an annual amount of about $560 billion giving an approximation to the industry’s size. Moreover, according to the UN estimations regarding corruption in donations, we could calculate that around $168 billion are lost from these 6 countries alone.  

EnlightAID hopes to provide transparency to the complex ecosystem of stakeholders working on the ground to restore and protect ecosystems. First, organizations aiming to receive funds must go through an integrated compliance and anti-money laundering (AML) process. Once approved for fundraising, all resources are monitored, reporting back to donors and informing them of the use that an organization made of their contribution. EnlightAID’s technology can be scaled beyond donations, to help monitor resources coming from any source ensuring real-time transparency for all impact oriented projects and ESG investments.

EnlightAID visualizes the use of donations in real-time. We have created a real-time message broker for fragmented transactional information. Through a cloud service, and by using a distributed database and a secure authentication, EnlightAID is coupling together information from disparate payment providers into a usable format for transparency. Our technology translates and publishes the information into readable, accessible and actionable data for impact creation. 

EnlightAID’s has a holistic approach towards transparency, going beyond financial reporting by creating a deep social experience that allows organizations, people and companies to collaborate. Facilitating financial contributions, volunteering, impact communication and more.

EnlightAID has been designed mobile first, ensuring maximum compatibility with phones, tablets and computers without any required downloads. Through the implementation of EnlightAID v1, we worked with Uwezo, a small organization from the county of Voi in Kenya. The women who ran Uwezo had no access to computers and their phones had a limited storage capacity. By having a web-based solution we were able to give them access to the same tools as someone with a computer or a last generation phone would have, as using EnlightAID required no segregated storage in their phones.

EnlightAID hopes to provide transparency to the global community. Through the implementation of the first version of our platform we worked with organizations of multiple sizes in seven countries: Chile, Perú, Mexico, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Madagascar and Norway. Within the testing phase, which lasted almost one and a half years, our team was able to successfully show full traceability of funds in real-time. 

Currently, the international approach towards corruption focuses mostly on measuring the perception of corrupt activities, leaving the origin of the problem: lack of transparency and true accountability, untouched. The most accepted indicators of corruption are dependent on what they define as “expert knowledge”, gathering data from countries’ elites and private interests regarding their perception of the scale of the corruption problem. At the organizational level, accountability has been dealt with reports which are distributed once a year to donors and the public. That is if the organization in question is big enough to be able to afford such a deliverable. World renowned brands such as Red Cross, Unicef, Greenpeace or WWF, to name a few, are able to provide such documentation. However, smaller organizations are, in most cases, unable to produce such reports. This results in smaller organizations being ineligible for international funding even if their results are better than those of large recognizable brands. Furthermore, this reduces the opportunity to compete for such organizations and lowers the dynamism of the market. Which in turn can be conducive to misbehaviour and further wrongful appropriation of funds.

EnlightAID’s proposal is to even the playing field by ensuring all organizations contributing to environmental protection and restoration are able to provide real-time reporting on their use of funds to the communities they are inserted in. Since our technology provides financial transparency and monitoring, our focus is to provide it for the work of organizations such as Foundations, NGOs and social businesses. At this stage we do not aim to work with direct donations to individuals as we value individual privacy and believe organizations should be held accountable for their spending.

In 2018 the global cost of corruption was estimated to be of at least $2.6 trillion, about 5 percent of the global gross domestic product by the World Economic Forum. Corruption has a serious negative impact on the environment. A good example of this is embezzlement during the implementation of environmental programs. By providing scalable and verifiable monitoring of financial data within these projects our aim is to significantly reduce this problem, maximising the resources that make it to their intended destinations. As the best conceived environmental projects cannot be completed if the resources destined for them are lost.

Between 2017 and 2019 we deployed the first version of EnlightAID working with organizations in Chile, Perú, México, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Madagascar and Norway. With EnlightAID v1 our team was able to prove real-time transparency was not only possible but desirable by donors.

Even though we have completed successful pilots, we did not choose the Scale or Growth stages because we are currently in the process of releasing EnlightAID v2 which hasn’t been fully tested. This second version is partially available already and we expect to reinstate donations within July. Currently organizations from Chile, Mexico and Germany have registered in the new platform and we are working in a closed version with pilots in these countries. Official release of the new version will be done in October, time in which we would consider ourselves in the growth stage.

At the moment end-of-the-year reports provided by the organizations that accept donations to create projects toward environmental protection and ecosystem resilience are what is broadly accepted as proof of proper utilization of funds. However, malfeasance can be hidden in yearly reports, especially when the auditing team is required to go over hundreds or even thousands of financial entries. Moreover, relying solely on end-of-the-year-reports can make correcting the problem virtually impossible, as taking action if misbehavior has occurred months before the reporting process has taken place can be difficult and the resources will already be lost, never to be seen again. 

With EnlightAID’s technology our aim is to provide real-time auditing capabilities, that way expenses deviating from what is forecasted for a project can be detected as it happens. Further disbursement of resources can be paused until the matter is properly investigated and the organization has taken action, only to continue once the situation has been explained and if necessary, corrected. This new way of managing projects will contribute to significantly reducing risks for project funders whether they are people, companies or international organizations. 

At a later stage, our aim is to scale EnlightAID’s technology to be used by a multiplicity of use cases. Imagine governments real-time reporting on tax expenditures or large ESG investment firms tracing their use funds ensuring proper usage, the possibilities are endless.

At the moment we are serving approximately 100 people and 9 organizations in our soft-launch pilot. This number is expected to increase by at least 10 more organizations by the end of the year and our ambition is to have 1.000 individuals registered on the platform by the end of 2021. The CSR module will be released in September, for which we have 3 companies lined up for pilots, one in Norway, one in Germany and one in Chile. Once the testing phase has been completed, we expect to scale the technology to millions.

Currently we measure our progress based on the amount of users registered in the platform: individuals, organizations and companies. As usage grows we will be able to deploy EnlightAID’s global project archive, this way comparing projects will be done in an effective way. For example, imagine 50 reforestation projects are created in Mexico using EnlightAID’s technology. With this information we will be able to determine average cost per location and type of project. That information will then become the benchmark for any similar projects, this process will allow us to recognize and flag irregularities as they come, further reducing risks of malfeasance. 

Financial corruption cannot be measured unless resources disappear, which is why with EnlightAID we have focused on designing a platform that allows everyone to see project effectiveness. This way we can focus on the solution instead of on measuring the scale of the problem.

Currently a team has 9 people, 1 founder who works full-time, 3 founders who work part-time, 3 coders who work full-time and 2 coders who work part-time.

The concept was created by Verónica, Klaus and Patricio, who have known each other as colleagues and friends since 2012. Joakim joined us in 2016 after meeting at a conference, thus completing our founding team. Our founding team has over 30 years of combined experience in technology as well as almost 20 years in design, project management and sustainability consulting. We are an inherently diverse founding team from Norway and Chile, and have built over the years a culture collaboration with a fully remote team since 2017. Regarding development, our coding team is located in Chile and Venezuela. Having experienced the third world and vulnerability first hand, we have a closer connection to many of the issues and stigmas surrounding aid. As a team we come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, we represent different nationalities, gender, age and sexual orientation. We understand hardship, poverty, hunger and corruption first hand. We ask hard questions, challenge each other and, at times, we disagree. We bring these perspectives to the table and to the development of everything we do at EnlightAID, shaping the development of a technology that is meant to be truly transformative.

We understand diversity beyond gender, even with a small team we represent three nationalities already. We work, since the beginning of EnlighAID, with a fully remote team which allows us to look beyond nationality, origin, age or gender. At EnlightAID we only ask that our team members have access to the internet. We value, above most things, people who are willing to bring their point of view to the table and for that we make the conscious decision of inviting people from different countries, genders and of different generations to join our team. We will continue to do so.

EnlightAID aims to become a global solution in the fight against corruption. This is not an easy task and in order to achieve it we need support and access to a network that can help us connect with organizations that can implement our solution. MIT Solve belongs not only from one of the most respected institutions on the planet, but is also connected to key stakeholders. Our solution is now at a position where we can leverage this access to ensure real-time transparency becomes the norm.

Fintech4good is something most people are not used to hearing about. Even though awareness towards the problem of corruption in donations has increased over the years, most stakeholders are not yet actively looking for a way in which they can ensure transparency occurs in real-time. Most organizations and companies are quite content with providing end-of-the-year financial reports to their supporters, clients or associates. This has made it difficult for EnlightAID to secure funding that will enable our team to accelerate development and impact. By having the support of MIT Solve we are confident that we can polish our story, reach more and better potential clients and secure capital. Thus, increasing our chances to provide meaningful impact.

If we could choose three dream partners we would like to work with the Gates Foundation, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. All three are key when it comes to accelerating impact that can scale globally. We envision pilots in which they could use EnlightAID to monitor the environmental conservation projects they support across multiple borders, making sure resources are appropriately used on the ground. This would change the way in which the global community sees impact projects. 

Smart, safe and sustainable communities can be achieved by a combination of projects towards these goals. However, even the best laid out plans and projects cannot be executed if the resources meant to provide services and goods to complete them are lost to corruption. By providing real-time transparency EnlightAID’s goal is to guarantee all resources make it to their intended destinations which is why we would like to be considered for the GM Prize.

Women and girls require more role models to in the future create impact projects of their own. María Verónica Celis Vergara, EnlightAID’s founder and CEO has fought over the years to become this kind of role model. It is because of her ideas and determination that EnlightAID exists today and we believe she deserves this prize.

EnlightAID’s goal is to establish, in the long term, a global project archive which will be used to benchmark project cost profiles, creating predictive models for expenditures. This will allow irregularities to be flagged instantly by our system through AI. We would like to be considered for this prize in order to be able to develop this capability in our platform.

One of the goals of cryptocurrencies has been to provide immutable transparency to certain cash flows. We believe EnlightAID is in a unique position to contribute to this goal and we will be honored to be considered for this award.