Project Machu Picchu White Paper 2024, part 2

6 min readOct 9, 2024

credit maksym-ivashchenko-LVDTuA_cbTM-unsplash

(version OCTOBER 2024)

What is Machu Picchu?

Machu Picchu is an open-source, collaborative project focused on leveraging 21st-century technologies to improve the livelihoods of vulnerable populations. See here Part 1, the pains and the solutions : Part 1 (link)

Watch the 10-minute video here: https://youtu.be/z1ylfi60ES0

In this Part 2 we are going into detail of the needs.

Major Identified Needs

Need 1: Risk Mitigation by savings and by solidarity

To illustrate the first need, consider a scenario in Vietnam’s Red River delta, near Ninh Bình (https://goo.gl/maps/ikuSDJr3w2kHG9J96), where Mrs. Nguyên thi Sáu cultivates a small rice paddy. She and her husband, with five children between the ages of 4 and 10, live modestly, managing to save approximately 1 USD per month. Her approach to future risks is as follows:

Community Support: Mrs. Nguyên thi Sáu is part of a tight-knit village community of about 10 families. Rice farming requires extensive labor, and the community collectively handles tasks like irrigation maintenance, sowing, replanting, and harvesting. Each member is familiar with the others’ reputations, and they follow an informal risk-mitigation agreement overseen by a council of elders.
Savings for Planned and Unplanned Needs: Over time, she builds up savings to cover occasional family expenses, both planned (such as her eldest son attending secondary school in town) and unplanned (like replacing a broken wheelbarrow or enduring a bad crop season, which can last up to six months).
Access to Community Help: Mrs. Nguyên thi Sáu’s savings typically cover planned expenses. For minor unplanned events, she also relies on her savings. For more significant issues, she turns to her community, starting with family members, then neighbors, and finally the council of elders. Only as a last resort does she borrow from a local moneylender or bank. The help she receives from others depends on her past contributions, and it can come as a gift, a loan, or both. Each community member’s contribution is determined by their relationship with her, a concept reminiscent of the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Good_Samaritan).

Mrs. Nguyên thi Sáu is hesitant to buy insurance and rarely borrows from banks. These systems are too complex and distant from her customary practices, and her social network lacks the knowledge to explain how they function. In her community, insurance is generally seen as wasted money, and she only purchases it when required by a bank as a condition for a loan.

Need 2: Data Reporting Support to Helper

The second critical need is for humanitarian organizations to know whom to assist and how to do so effectively. The flow of information and aid between various stakeholders is as follows:

Donors: These are individuals like you and me, as well as government agencies such as USAID, the French AFD (Agence Française de Développement), and the German GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit).
Persons in Need: The end recipients of aid.
Helper Institutions: Registered organizations that collect funds from public or private donors in developed countries. Examples include large organizations like the Red Cross, Caritas, Médecins du Monde, and UN agencies like FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), UNHCR (UN Refugee Agency), UNICEF, WFP (World Food Programme), and WHO (World Health Organization).

What is less known to the public is that Helper Institutions do not directly assist the Persons in Need. Instead, they provide funding to local field helper associations, which distribute the aid and provide on-the-ground support to those in need. These local associations, staffed with field workers, help implement aid programs and educate communities on best practices in various daily activities.

A report by the International Council for Voluntary Agencies (ICVA) highlights the flow of funds, confirming the indirect nature of the support (see page 2 of the report): https://www.icvanetwork.org/uploads/2021/08/ICVA_Topic-One-Briefing-Paper.pdf):

Persons in Need interact primarily with National and Local Associations.
Donors interact mainly with Helper Institutions.
Helper Institutions develop aid programs and provide funding to Local Associations, which follow these programs.
Helper Institutions must report quantitative results to donors to justify the use of funds.

To produce these activity reports and define their programs, Helper Institutions rely on data from Local Associations. However, these local organizations are more focused on assisting Persons in Need than on data entry and management. As a result, the data they provide can lack quality and relevance, and they often receive no feedback on how their data is used in program design. This lack of feedback leads to little incentive for improving data collection.

The information quality degrades as it travels up the operational layers

Additionally, Local Associations often work with multiple international Helper Institutions, leading to confusion and overlap in the data they collect. As a result, only large-scale data tends to be somewhat reliable. According to a joint report by the Danish Red Cross, Mercy Corps, and Hive Online (November 18, 2020), traditional systems struggle with data loss, corruption, or poor entry quality (see page 10 of the report: https://www.mercycorps.org/research-resources/humanitarian-distributed-platform).

Quote: Traditional technology solutions and databases suffer from a litany of well-known problems, including data loss, data corruption or poor data entry, forcing a costly and time-consuming system of checks and balances. Moreover, most NGO systems are built by and for a single agency, resulting in duplication across organisations. Even where systems are shared, the utility of the data is limited to organisations with access to that system.

Need 3: Cash and Voucher Assistance (CVA)

The third key need involves improving Cash and Voucher Assistance (CVA), a method of directly providing cash or vouchers for goods and services to individuals, households, or communities in need.

According to the latest report issued in November 2023, based on 2022 data (https://www.calpnetwork.org/collection/the-state-of-the-worlds-cash-2023-report/), approximately US$7.9 billion was transferred as cash or vouchers to people affected by crises, out of a total of US$10 billion in humanitarian assistance. This represents a significant increase from 2019, when the total was US$5.7 billion.

Vouchers — which may take the form of cards, codes, or digital tokens redeemable at participating vendors — allow issuers to track exactly how funds are used, facilitating better reporting on aid distribution. However, voucher recipients frequently express dissatisfaction, citing poor treatment and vendor abuse. Consequently, in 2022, cash accounted for 81% of CVA, while vouchers represented just 19%.

Key factors surrounding CVA include:

In 2022, CVA represented 21% of international humanitarian assistance (IHA). The majority — 65% — was distributed through UN organizations.
NGOs use cash assistance less frequently because they struggle to report on the impact of the funds received, due to the difficulty of tracking how cash is used.
Most people in need prefer cash over other forms of assistance, as it provides them the freedom to choose how to address their own needs.
Designing inclusive CVA programs is complex. To do this effectively, recipients must be considered individually, especially if they have specific needs or disabilities — something UN organizations are not equipped to handle.
Cash programs are more challenging to implement for mobile populations — such as refugees and nomads — than for people in fixed locations. Issues like Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements for verifying identities present significant obstacles.

This highlights the importance of refining CVA programs to better meet the needs of vulnerable populations, while also addressing reporting and accountability concerns.