The power of crowdfunding to unite and create change in Georgia 

Anyone who wants to make a difference in their community is now able to mobilize support and funds in Georgia through the homegrown crowdfunding platform OrbelianiMeti. Officially launched with UNDP seed funding in late 2019, the platform has succeeded in attracting an additional US$900,000 of USAID funding for a five-year programme to support crowdfunding for civic initiatives in Georgia. How did UNDP Georgia’s pilot transform into a nation-wide programme with a 10-fold increase in funding within just a year?  

It all started with the Rustavi Innovation Hub, led by City Hall civil servants who were encouraged to experiment and use innovative approaches. This meant reaching out to new partners beyond the usual suspects for novel knowhow, experiences and practices.  

The post-industrial city of Rustavi aims to innovate to create new opportunities for the younger generation to thrive through accessible education, jobs and creative spaces.

Irakli Tabaghua, the Mayor of Rustavi when establishing the Rustavi Innovation Hub

The city exchanged practices with the municipalities from the Polish cities of Lublin, Łódź and Stalowa Wola on how to design the city’s future vision through Foresight methods, and plan specific activities using a gaming approach. Local partners, like the data outlet Forset helped develop basic data literacy skills within the community; while the first public sector innovation space ServiceLab in Georgia guided the hub through user-centred design to co-design urban initiatives – such as urban street addressing and the design of the interior of the local service hall to reflect the needs of diverse groups of people.

The hub also worked with the UK Behavioural Insights Team to design a plastic waste pilot, involving a number of public-private partnerships with 47 schools and kindergartens. This hands-on learning approach gave the hub confidence to independently launch a C-bot, a civil servant chatbot providing 24/7 information on local public services. This project was implemented in partnership with the artificial intelligence startup Pulsar AI which later became the first Georgian startup to be acquired by the US digital automotive merchandising platform SpinCar. 

Throughout this process, it became evident that alternative urban solutions proposed by individual citizens, groups or organizations at the local level needed new forms of funding and implementation. The city accepted the challenge and launched a match funding programme for youth initiatives to attract external investments. To manage the calls Rustavi Innovation Hub partnered with Orbeliani platform – a pioneering NGO democratizing access to donor funding. It offered both transparency, as the calls are announced and managed online, and administrative support. Orbeliani doesn’t issue direct funding to winning projects, but purchases all the necessary materials and hands them over to the initiative organizers for implementation. This arrangement overrides the requirement for official registration as a CSO, and gives access to individuals or groups to implement small scale community actions rooted in the local needs. The new funding modality, offered by the City Hall through Rustavi Innovation Hub and the Orbeliani platform, received a record number of 50 submissions for the first call. It transformed civic consultations into an action-based participation mechanism, linking civil servants and communities, albeit still largely dependent on external funding sources.  

While we were happy with this new modality of cooperation, we wanted to offer a match funding model – donor funding plus crowdfunding to mobilize resources, spur civic engagement, increase efficiency and multiply impact. We were lucky to join the UNDP-Rustavi urban transformation journey, which helped us connect with the local and external expertise and make our plans a reality.

Ketevan Khachidze, Ex-Director of  Orbeliani

It is at this junction that the City of Rustavi joined UNDP’s initiative to bring together mayors from eight countries to boost financing for solar energy in cities across the world. The choice of Rustavi was not incidental – the city as a signatory to European Energy Cities Covenant of Mayors was acknowledged for its local actions on energy efficiency.  

Supported by UNDP AltFinLab, a unit within the Innovation team at UNDP Europe and Central Asia promoting alternative finance, the local team was guided through a series of webinars on crowdfunding and partnership building. They also connected with the founder of the first crowdfunding platform in Georgia – WeHelp.ge – to learn about the local context and crowdfunding ecosystem. Although the initial plans envisaged the development of a single crowdfunding campaign for a solar panel installation, the process took an unexpected turn. Orbeliani teamed up with Rustavi Innovation Hub, the selected schools, Future Laboratory and the Business and Technology University (BTU) for the Entrepreneurial Skills Development for Youth initiative. In addition to mentorship provided by Future Laboratory and BTU, students trained within the framework of MIT Global Start up Lab, and eight participating youth teams were given an introduction to crowdfunding and access to the Orbeliani platform.  

The designed innovative model for action-based participation, linking local governance and individual citizens, has subsequently been replicated within UNDP local governance programming in three other municipalities: Marneuli, Bolnisi and Dmanisi. With USAID support, Orbeliani expanded its crowdfunding platform to other municipalities and in total helped raise 30,000 GEL for community initiatives by the end of 2020. Not surprisingly, community activists or groups in the municipalities see the non-monetary side of the crowdfunding much more appealing. Elnur Alisoy, who raised funds to organize an open-air museum of local heritage, noted that “crowdfunding is much more than money”, it allowed them to tap into the social capital by communicating about their ideas and mobilize genuine support from the people in the community and local authorities.  

The city’s support for the use of crowdfunding, which is largely perceived as community work, created unprecedented conditions for transforming a single crowdfunding campaign into a collaborative movement of academia, public and private actors. It was centred around creating new opportunities for urban youth, and empowering them with cutting-edge skills and tools to take matters into their own hands. This example inspired others to follow: leading to the creation of the crowdfunding platform OrbelianiMeti.  

Within UNDP the framework for this exploratory journey was provided by UNDP Innovation Facility and Country Investment Facility.