Humanitarian Assistance ResPonse Platform (HARP)

Deploying humanitarian aid requires extreme agility

Humanitarian crises create environments that are complex, dangerous, and quickly changing. Volunteers often help coordinate aid disbursement without a formal system to coordinate resources or receive and track requests. Working in an ad hoc manner results in inefficient, manual, and unscalable processes. The Humanitarian Assistance Response Platform (HARP) is a technology platform that optimizes NGO humanitarian aid disbursement.

How HARP Works

A diverse team of volunteer technology and operations experts have developed and deployed HARP to enable NGO volunteers to intake, manage, and disposition humanitarian aid requests. This improves efficiency and accuracy, ensuring vulnerable populations receive more aid, faster.

Case Study: Step with Hope
Dnipro, Ukraine

CFHT partnered with Step with Hope in Dnipro, Ukraine to intake and process requests for grocery kits from internally displaced people in southern Ukraine. HARP replaced a manual mobile phone based intake process which could only intake a few hundred IDPs per month. With HARP, all requests are formatted in the same way in one easily accessible and secure system. Today, HARP is used to intake up to 10,000 IDP requests per month with a total of 35,000 families served through the platform in the past year.

HARP SCOPE & CFHT SUPPORT

Technology: HARP includes a customized telegram intake bot built for Ukrainian IDPs (designed to be adapted to other use cases) and the Zendesk ticketing system (an off-the-shelf request platform configured to suite NGOs)

Processes & Customization: CFHT works with NGO partners to understand current ways of working and update technology platforms to support specific needs

Deployment: CFHT supports platform deployment, helps optimize operations of the platform, provides training on the platform, and supports NGO operations teams until handover

NGO Contribution: NGOs using HARP provide human resources to process requests and the human, logistical, and operational resources to provide aid on-the-ground