After decades in philanthropy, Derek Lubner reached a conclusion many funders never articulate: giving money away is the simple part, while verifying where it ends up is the real challenge. In an interview with TechCabal's Phathisani Moyo, the co-founder and chairman of iZinga Assist, a digital non-profit verification and support platform, explained how he intends to repair the trust deficit between donors and grassroots non-profit organisations in South Africa.

When Lubner was managing his late parents' foundation, Make an Immediate Difference, he routinely asked beneficiary organisations to submit wish lists for the coming year. If a group wanted cricket bats and nets, a classroom or a soccer field, he would consider the request and agree to fund all or part of it. His only condition was that the organisation send him a photograph showing what the money had paid for.

Over the years, he estimates that barely a quarter of the organisations ever sent the requested pictures, leaving him without a straightforward way to confirm whether equipment had been purchased or projects delivered.

For someone dedicated to supporting grassroots community initiatives across South Africa, the omission was frustrating. Yet it also forced him to reconsider the administrative burden that traditional donors impose on frontline social workers.

"I could have blamed the organisations and cut their funding," Lubner told TechCabal. "Instead, I realised we needed to help them meet those compliance requirements."

That conviction led to the creation of iZinga Assist, which Lubner co-founded with chief executive Henk Swanepoel. The platform was designed to make grassroots non-profits more visible, structurally sound and easier for donors to vet.

In a sector where registration alone does not establish whether an organisation is active, well-governed or accountable for its funding, iZinga Assist digitally checks NGOs' documentation and provides resources to help them close administrative gaps. The goal is twofold: give donors reliable data before they deploy capital, and prevent paperwork from locking legitimate community leaders out of funding pipelines.

Lubner had seen first-hand that an organisation can be deeply rooted in its community while remaining ill-equipped to meet the rigorous reporting standards demanded by institutional philanthropists.

Learning to look beyond the donation

Lubner's outlook was shaped by nearly three decades in civil society, including a board seat at Mothers2Mothers since the organisation's inception in 2001. Founded in Cape Town at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the maternal health organisation pairs mothers living with HIV with pregnant women confronting new diagnoses, offering frontline guidance on treatment adherence and child protection.

Mothers2Mothers demonstrated how social intervention succeeds when it is built around lived experience and backed by professionalised systems. Notably, the organisation insisted on formally employing its mentor mothers rather than relying on unpaid volunteer labour, and it resisted mission creep despite persistent donor pressure to chase unrelated grants.

Managing his family's portfolio of 35 40 local non-profits gave Lubner the complementary funder's perspective. It made clear that the chronic reporting failures he witnessed were rarely acts of fraud; they were symptoms of severe under-resourcing. Small social initiatives simply lacked the administrative bandwidth to produce institutional-grade documentation.

That realisation informed the development of iZinga Assist during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than penalising under-staffed teams, the platform was conceived as an operational scaffold to help them structure their governance and become investor-ready.

"We wanted to shine a light on the under-served tier of the sector," Lubner said. "The objective is to make these organisations both verified and visible to prospective funders."

Making organisations easier to trust

To secure verification, iZinga Assist requires non-profits to upload roughly 20 statutory documents, spanning founding constitutions, board charters, tax compliance and audited financial statements. Where documentation is missing or inadequate, the platform supplies standardised contract templates, governance guidelines and direct coaching.

Onboarding and verification remain completely free for applicant organisations — a deliberate choice to ensure that limited cash reserves do not prevent legitimate groups from demonstrating compliance.

"NGO leaders often do not know what they do not know," Lubner noted. "We try to lift that administrative burden, including by maintaining a secure cloud repository for their files so they are always audit-ready."

According to Lubner, the platform has onboarded more than 500 organisations, with roughly 110 — about one in five of those onboarded — achieving full verification. Completing the audit often takes months or even years, as many grassroots teams either have incomplete records or feel apprehensive about disclosing their internal books.

South Africa's non-profit register provides a count of registered organisations, but registration alone does not show whether an organisation remains active, maintains its records or delivers the work described in its founding documents. The scale of the sector makes that distinction consequential.

iZinga Assist has cited the 289,852 organisations on the Department of Social Development's register as of the end of September 2025, along with Trialogue's estimate of R13.1 billion ($797.8 million) in corporate social investment spending in 2025. Those figures describe the wider sector, not funds verified or tracked by iZinga Assist.

For Lubner, the opportunity lies in closing the information gap between organisations seeking support and donors who need confidence in how their money will be used. That includes South Africans living abroad who want to back causes at home but may struggle to identify credible organisations.

He envisages donors being able to identify the causes they care about and receive updates in line with their preferences. Someone interested in sport, for example, could support a community cricket programme and receive confirmation that equipment purchased with their donation reached the intended organisation.

The platform is exploring ways to make that process easier to track, including payment arrangements that could confirm when money has been spent on an agreed item. In one model Lubner describes, an NGO could use a payment card to purchase something specific, such as cricket bats, with the donor receiving confirmation of the transaction.

The objective is to replace philanthropic guesswork with verifiable paper trails. Yet Lubner readily concedes that proof of transaction is not synonymous with lasting community transformation.

"'Impact' is a term thrown around casually, but its definition varies wildly," he said. A community initiative might miss an arbitrary numerical target because of unforeseen local unrest or weather events without its underlying mission becoming invalid.

That distinction matters: a photograph of soccer balls confirms procurement, but it cannot determine whether youth delinquency declined or whether sports participation improved mental health. A credible verification mechanism, Lubner argues, must clearly delineate administrative compliance from long-term social efficacy.

Building trust without creating another barrier

iZinga Assist faces a verification challenge of its own: no external regulator currently audits its proprietary methodology, and remote document checks are no substitute for on-the-ground inspection.

"Donors have to place confidence in our vetting, and we recognise that scrutinising our own credibility is a fair demand," Lubner acknowledged.

Digital document reviews can confirm statutory registration and corporate governance, but they cannot prove that an organisation is actively running the clinics or food kitchens it claims to run. The platform's forthcoming five-star rating index will therefore have to disclose clearly where documentary verification ends and physical validation begins.

To address the gap, Lubner is courting commercial banks and corporate donors to mobilise their workforces for volunteer field visits. Properly trained corporate volunteers could carry out periodic on-site spot-checks, providing donor validation while connecting corporate personnel directly with local communities.

Lubner also insists that accountability must run in both directions. Donors, in his view, need to communicate their metrics clearly rather than impose shifting reporting targets. "Too often, non-profits spray hundreds of proposals into the dark, while donors sit on capital because they cannot separate genuine operators from paper organisations," he said. "We need symmetry in that relationship."

Achieving platform sustainability is the next operational test. Because core verification will remain free for non-profits, iZinga Assist plans to monetise by licensing its vetting infrastructure to corporate CSI teams, philanthropic foundations and wealth managers that require compliance-as-a-service.

"I am not looking to make a fortune from iZinga Assist; the goal is operational self-sufficiency," Lubner said. His five-year objective is to assemble an active network of several thousand verified non-profits that use the portal to source legal templates, professional development courses, vetted consultants and verified funding leads.

What began decades ago as a quest for missing photographs has grown into an ambitious structural intervention. Lubner is attempting to rewire an opaque philanthropic sector in which well-intentioned donors and committed grassroots organisations remain divided by paperwork and mutual distrust.

Whether iZinga Assist succeeds will depend not just on the code it deploys or the documents it checks, but on whether the platform can command the same institutional credibility it is asking South Africa's non-profits to prove.

This article is based on an interview conducted by Phathisani Moyo, originally published by TechCabal.