By Dianna Langley Interim Chief Executive Officer and Chief Operating Officer, NetHope, and Jean-Louis Ecochard, Chief Innovation Officer, NetHope
At NetHope, we live by a simple truth: transformation starts with people. Even digital transformation, with all its efficiency gains and novel opportunities for impact, still starts with people coming together in collaboration. Complex systems and complex intractable problems require collaborative networks of impact. Networks that surface the deep understanding of what staff and partners need to deliver their work, and also harness the energy of a web of multi-sectoral supporters who bring their own strengths, expertise, and technology to the issues at hand. By nurturing our own NetHope network of impact, we have enabled our international nonprofit Members to achieve extraordinary efficiency over the past twenty years, working with less cost, less effort, and to reach more people with lifesaving aid.
Today, the world faces polycrisis: climate shocks, a marked rise in urgent and prolonged humanitarian emergencies, accelerating social needs, and a breakdown of trust in large institutions.
As the United Nations marks its 80th anniversary, and global aid budgets are shrinking, the world is asking a critical question: how can global institutions remain relevant and impactful in the digital age?
Simultaneously, there are new digital divides worldwide: from inclusion and protection to transformation and innovation. At the community level, local governments, civil society, and small businesses often share the same dreams but lack the equal access to digital skills, tools, and data that would yield enormous positive impact in their hands. These smaller actors are the first responders, the front line workers, and the interface to the people the UN is seeking to create positive impact for.
UN80 rightly focused on efficiencies, structural reforms, and program realignment, yet to truly meet the world’s large multidimensional crises will demand that the entire aid and development system speedily adapt to the realities of a hyper-digital post-Covid world and find massive productivity gains at the same time. This includes finding ways to bring those efficiencies to those communities where the need is greatest.
Seemingly impossible. Yet perhaps for the first time, a whole-of-supply-chain digital transformation approach that brings opportunities for efficiency is within reach for the aid and development sector (from global multilateral to frontline health worker), and with it a significantly boosted ability to mitigate these crises.
UN80 and the decline and shift in traditional aid and development funding is opening conversations that were stifled before. Previously unsolvable patterns of behaviour that limited progress have been upended. New and smaller funders that were pushed out the room by the behemoths are finding more breathing space, and encouraging more new and transformative ideas to be supported.
Middle and Low Income Countries are embracing the promise of digital done well, and increasingly seek to leapfrog their economies by boosting citizen’s engagement and investing in massive digital skills training programs on everything from online safety to AI.
The gains in making technology highly accessible, from increasingly globally dispersed providers, is putting more digital tools in the hands of more people than ever before, creating fertile ground for strong connections within the network of impact from global multilateral institutions all the way to the local community and the individual citizen.
Civil society’s role is central to this equation. Global, national, and subnational nonprofits often serve as service providers between government agencies and citizens, translating UN or national policies into activities that reflect communities’ lived realities. Large international NGOs and smaller national or subnational implementers are indispensable at the last mile of aid delivery, where human need is most acute. In this last mile the citizens are themselves more digitally enabled than ever before, and meeting them in their time of need requires digital transformation that reaches them too, so they can join the global digital conversation.
The situation is clear: digital collaboration cannot and must not stop at the global level, nor can it operate through parallel aid supply chains. There must be frictionless interoperability of digital information and systems across and through the entire supply chain of aid, creating highly responsive networks of impact. In the case of the UN, its aid architecture must be tightly integrated with civil society’s digital infrastructure so that knowledge, resources, and decisions flow seamlessly from headquarters to the last mile. Only then will we achieve the agility, efficiency, and impact that today’s polycrisis demands.
At UNGA80, as we in the aid and development sector reflect on how this multilateral system should best respond to the pressures it faces, NetHope is clear that the transformative power of digital and a collaborative network is critical to the answer. It is only together that we will be able to balance how nations can maintain digital sovereignty while enabling the free flow of information that accelerates social good, restores human wellbeing, and improves aid delivery. It is only through high-trust partnerships and networks that political differences can be mediated to enable a shared, interoperable aid infrastructure that enables collective action, drives efficiencies, and unlocks exponential value for the well-being of humanity. If the UN and our wider sector is to remain relevant, it must embrace digital transformation across and throughout the entire aid supply chain – from multilaterals like the UN to international aid agencies, to nations, and to sub-national delivery. Ensuring digital for good works at the local as well as global level.
The stakes are urgent. Fragmented infrastructures, siloed systems, and inefficient decision-making, undermine our collective efforts, and limit the promise of emerging technologies like GenAI. But when we get it right, the impact is enormous. NetHope has proven this repeatedly: training hundreds of nonprofit executives through our Digital Leadership Institute, creating a Global Humanitarian ISAC paired with vCISO services to counter the cybersecurity crisis in NGOs, amplifying local voices in climate adaptation programs, and responsibly guiding AI adoption across the sector by giving thousands of participants ethical AI adoption training. Each program networks our nonprofit Members with our corporate partners and donors, and brings the positive impact of digital to the table. Each initiative reduces duplication, spreads knowledge, and strengthens the whole. Every time we expand the network of impact by bringing in more NGOs, or governments, or donors, or multilaterals, we exponentially increase what we can achieve together – just as the internet itself grows in value when each new node contributes and benefits from the whole.
The time is right to bring more people to the conversation and expand our network of impact. Digital transformation throughout the whole of the aid supply chain is within reach, and is the only answer to the problems on the table, at UN80 and beyond.
