Blockchain-based donations traceability framework

Abstract

The rapid growth of modern technologies has encouraged non-profit organizations (NPOs) to harness such technologies to better serve the charity sector, especially in relation to charity donation processes. Non-profit organizations primarily rely on fundraising that may involve opaque operations, which leads to the exacerbation of fears that donations may be used for illegal purposes or not reach deserving people. The necessity of charity donations traceability system is inevitable to overcome such concerns, which have an adverse impact on doners’ trust in the donation process. In this study, we propose a blockchain-based donation traceability framework intended to enable all involved parties to trace the progress of charity donations from the moment they are given by donors to the moment they reach the intended recipients. The system is built on a public-permissioned blockchain on the Ethereum platform, with every transaction being recorded as a block in the chain. These blocks of information are immutable and visible to all parties, and they also enable timely and traceable transactions. The proposed framework’s effectiveness is evaluated using a hybrid qualitative approach and proves to improve the traceability of charity donations overcoming the uncertainty associated with current systems.