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World Food Programme in global partnership with Mastercard

Fundraising | Kirsty Weakley | 14 Sep 2012

The World Food Programme (WFP) and Mastercard yesterday announced a global partnership that will see the organisations work together to scale up its digital food programmes and launch an online donation platform to engage shoppers.

WFP hopes that by 2015 the proportion of food aid it delivers digitally will increase from 5 per cent to 30 per cent. 

Currently 2 million people receive food vouchers digitally, either on a pre-loaded card – which can be topped up remotely, or through their mobile phones.

Nancy Roman, director of communications, public policy and private partnerships at the World Food Programme advised on the challenges the organisation faces in its aim of increasing the digital delivery:

“These kinds of exciting innovations we’re piloting in any number of countries. But what we’ve painfully realised is when they’re working and we want to scale them to another country the technology gets very complicated.”

Pierre Guillame Wielezynski, head of web at WFP added: “There has been a plethora of things that all work but I think the objective here is to standardise and scale.”

Ann Cairns, president of international markets at Mastercard explained that digital money was preferable because it is “more secure and traceable than cash has ever been”.

The two organisations started working together 18 months ago and the charity has already seen the benefits of the advice and support to its existing programmes. Head of global products and solutions at Mastercard, Gaetano Carboni told civilsociety.co.uk that the company approached WFP as it was the biggest humanitarian agency.

He explained: “Mastercard was looking for a partner who could focus our CSR initiatives because we used to have many partners and we realised this is less efficient than both in terms of doing good and in strengthening the Mastercard brand.”

Roman said that securing the partnership with Mastercard had come at the right time for the charity because: “We are all now coming to appreciate that in the developed world, governments that have tackled the problem traditionally are really crushed under debt and finding it more challenging – so they’re both less willing and less able to take on some of these problems.”

Integrated giving platform

Mastercard is also going to build a new giving platform by the end of this year that will raise money from consumers as they shop online. Retailers would add the donation facility to their websites so shoppers could add a donation as they shop rather than being directed to WFP’s own website.

It hopes to pilot the scheme before the end of the year and then begin rolling it out and signing up retailers over the course of 2013.

Roman said the platform would “incentivise and reward behaviour” by tracking donations made by individuals and rewarding them with vouchers.

It will launch as an online tool initially but Cairns said that there was “no reason” why the solution could not be expanded to point of sale terminals on the high street shops.