Crowdwave’s leg-up for NGO fundraising

One of the most frequent questions Ritika Rai Reddy would hear as she started working part time with NGOs was, ‘how do you know which one you can trust?’. What if there was a catalogue of NGOs for people to browse, choose and donate to? “My goal has always been to bridge that gap between potential donors who need a platform of campaigns to choose from, and the smaller NGOs that need assistance but don’t have the platform to gather the kind of support they need,” she says. This is what she has been doing the past 10 months with her platform Crowdwave. When Ritika returned from her graduate school in the US, it was to join her family business in steel manufacturing. However, an interest in NGOs and charity work led to her starting the platform in 2017. “When the pandemic hit, NGOs lost their usual donors as many were not necessarily in a position to contribute. That’s when we redid our platform to fill this gap,” she says.