How Derek Lubner is building a digital bridge between donors and non-profits

After decades in philanthropy, Derek Lubner discovered that giving money was simple; verifying where it went was the real challenge. In conversation with PHATHISANI MOYO,  the iZinga Assist co-founder explains how he plans to repair the trust deficit between donors and grassroots NGOs. 

When Derek Lubner was managing his late parents’ foundation, Make an Immediate Difference, he routinely asked beneficiary non-profit organisations to submit wish lists for the upcoming year. 

If an organisation wanted cricket bats and nets, a classroom or a soccer field, the co-founder and chairman of iZinga Assist, digital non-profit verification and support platform, 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 with no straightforward way to confirm whether the equipment had been purchased or the project 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 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 spurred the creation of iZinga Assist, co-founded with chief executive Henk Swanepoel. The digital 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, the platform digitally checks NGOs’ documentation and offers resources to help them address administrative gaps. The goal is twofold: give donors reliable data before deploying capital, and prevent administrative paperwork from locking legitimate community leaders out of funding pipelines.

Lubner had seen first-hand that an organisation can be passionately 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 perspective had been shaped by nearly three decades in civil society, including a board seat at Mothers2Mothers since its inception in 2001. Founded in Cape Town during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the maternal health organisation pairs mothers living with HIV with pregnant women confronting new diagnoses, providing frontline guidance on treatment adherence and child protection.

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

Derek Lubner has served on the board of Mothers2Mothers since its founding in 2001, an experience that shaped his understanding of how non-profits can deliver meaningful community support. Image source: Global Living

Managing his family’s portfolio of 35 to 40 local non-profits provided 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 explained. “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 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 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 internal books.

South Africa’s non-profit register provides a count of registered organisations, but registration alone does not establish 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 important.

iZinga Assist cited 289,852 organisations on the Department of Social Development’s register at the end of September 2025 and 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 is to close 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 support causes at home but may struggle to identify credible organisations.

He envisages donors being able to identify 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 explained. A community initiative might miss an arbitrary numerical target due to unforeseen local unrest or weather events without rendering its underlying mission invalid.

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

Building trust without creating another barrier

iZinga Assist faces its own verification challenge: no external regulator currently audits its proprietary methodology, and remote document checks do not 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 confirm statutory registration and corporate governance, but they cannot prove that an organisation is actively running the clinics or food kitchens it claims. The platform’s forthcoming five-star rating index will have to clearly disclose where documentary verification ends and physical validation begins.

To solve this, Lubner is courting commercial banks and corporate donors to mobilise their workforce for volunteer field visits. Properly trained corporate volunteers could perform periodic on-site spot-checks, providing donor validation while connecting corporate personnel directly with local communities.

Lubner insists accountability must be mutual. Donors must communicate their metrics with clarity rather than imposing 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.”

Derek Lubner and Henk Swanepoel co-founded iZinga Assist to help non-profit organisations demonstrate their credibility, improve governance and connect with donors. Image source: iZinga Assist 

Achieving platform sustainability is the next operational test. As core verification will remain free for non-profits, iZinga Assist must monetise by licensing its vetting infrastructure to corporate CSI teams, philanthropic foundations, and wealth managers who 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 expanded into an ambitious structural intervention. Lubner is attempting to rewire an opaque philanthropic sector where 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 it can command the same institutional credibility it is asking South Africa’s non-profits to prove.

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