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Donors

Donors

Owned by Sarah Farooqi
Last updated: Mar 06, 2025
3 min read

Current profile on donors:

Donors can use this tool to coordinate investments with other donors. Using the lens of the SDG target, a donor can navigate to a priority SDG target to see what use cases, workflows, and ICT building blocks may support the progression of that target.

Understanding those associations set the groundwork for donors to see the overlap they have with other donors supporting other SDG targets. The tool demonstrates that a handful of work flows and building blocks can deliver a wide range of SDG targets and corresponding use cases.

 

Profile below is fictitious.

 

Meghan works for ***. She leads the portfolio on SDG 2: Zero Hunger and has a deep understanding of policy themes and challenges that exist to meet this goal by 2030. She has access to funds that she needs to distribute over the next 2 years and is keen to understand how to best use these funds. She has been involved in a working group with other donors on the SDG Digital Investment Framework and appreciates that digital can help her accelerate the work she is doing. Meghan is comfortable using technology for her own work, but is not a technologist and doesn’t have an expertise in programming or open source.

She wants to have a mechanism where she can coordinate investments with other donors working on SDG 2. She also wants to be able to quickly and easily understand which digital technologies she can invest in for her projects and how she can measure the impact of these investments. She also wishes there was a way to have a more efficient procurement and contracting process, where often stringent requirements are easier for implementing partners to fulfil.

Meghan is reliant on partners organizations to completely understand local contexts because she does not directly work in the regions where she will be making investments, but she still wants for her team to be able to track and check impact in a measurable way.

For Meghan, using the Catalog presents an opportunity to coordinate investments with other donors, access a single location for information available digital technologies and their uses, use a common framework to measure impact, and simplify procurement processes for implementing partners while meeting all legal requirements.

 

Characteristics

Motivations/Goals

Challenges/Pain Points

Role

Characteristics

Motivations/Goals

Challenges/Pain Points

Role

  • Western-centric

  • Deep understanding of SDGs

  • Appreciation for SDG Digital Investment Framework

  • Appreciation for digital as a pathway to achieve SDGs

  • Technical expertise can vary

  • More coordinated investments with other donors

  • Greater understanding of which digital technologies to invest in

  • Measurable outcomes and impact using simplified ontology of the SDG Digital Investment Framework

  • Improved procurement processes

  • Weak understanding based on limited data models

  • Channels of information are heavily reliant on partners for local understanding

  • Lack of humanized personalization due to limited and/or superficial linkages in local contexts

  • Lack of reporting and analysis and a need to provide capacity building on process processes/procedures prior to starting localized engagements

  • “Sustainer”

  • Important financial catalyst for digital development

 

Suggested:

Donors are important catalyzers for digital development, particularly for low-resource contexts, and can use this platform to track which common building blocks, workflows, and use cases to accelerate the achievement of SDG targets.

As the data extension of the SDG Investment Framework, this tool can be used to coordinate investments with other donors, gain a deeper understanding of available digital technologies, and measure the impact of investments.

 

 

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