There is a strong consensus that cash is one of the most effective forms of humanitarian assistance; however, disbursing cash isn’t always easy – especially if you want to facilitate payments to institutions. In Ukraine, the IOM Site Management program wanted to provide collective centres housing displaced Ukrainians with cash assistance to help manage daily expenses. However, in order to comply with IOM, Ukrainian government, and donor rules, each grant required internal approvals, a contract with the facility manager, and a financial report in order for cash to be disbursed and accounted for. Traditionally, each contract would have been handled by a contract manager who would communicate with managers at the collective centres to collect the information and manually create each document required for the process, pausing to get approvals in between. With nearly 1.2 million USD in cash grants to issue – it’s a lot of approvals, contracts, and reports to manage, and teams would spend hours on each contract.

To speed up the process, the team was able to migrate the approval and request process into Zite Manager. The data required from each centre was standardized and collected by IOM field staff, and the program used Zite Manager to approve each request. Custom reports from Zite Manager were then created to automatically export data and generate contracts for managers of collective centres to sign.

In this new system, cash requests were submitted and approved in the application, and a single Information Manager was able to export and automatically generate contracts for the approved requests within an hour. This enabled them to issue more than 1,750 grants to nearly 450 collective centres across Ukraine on a continual basis. By streamlining and automating this process, the small team was able to save over 2,650 hours in time per grant cycle – nearly 16 months of work for a single person – and free up their time to focus on more parts of the response. The reality is that in many places, we can’t always do away with administrative burden, but with new tools, automation, and creative approaches, we can minimize the time we spend on administrative tasks and maximize the time we spend creating impact.