Frequently Asked Questions
Kabissa represents a vision to empower grassroots organizations in Africa to take control over their means of communication. Over 1600 organizations working in Africa maintain a profile in our directory and depend on Kabissa for accessing and sharing information relevant to their important work and for building up their capacity to use technology in support of their mission.
Run by volunteers, Kabissa's running costs are low but we still have costs - and we depend on donations to cover our core annual operating budget which is $20,000 and pays for server hosting and maintenance costs, book keeping and annual independent audit. Funds raised beyond that amount are contributed towards special projects to improve the Kabissa platform and strengthen our network.
Thanks to the generosity of individual donors, we were given the opportunity to have an exciting and productive year in which we:
- established an innovative online volunteering infrastructure and started using it to recruit and put to work an amazing, dedicated team of 10 people to run Kabissa including volunteer recruitment, membership management, member content and newsletter editing, and website design and development.
- launched an upgraded website with a beautiful yet flexible design created by volunteers and implemented with streamlined collaboration features created specifically with our African members in mind.
- proposed and started implementing an innovative Open Data plan to further empower organizations in the Kabissa network by enabling the infromation they put online about themselves to be exported for use offline and "mashed up" with other data by other organizations.
- recruited two distinguished and inspiring new board members, Jeff Thindwa from World Bank Institute and George Scharffenberger from UC Berkeley. They replaced Peter Eigen and Daniel Ritchie, who shifted to the newly formed Kabissa Advisory Board.
We have an exciting year ahead of us. As funding, interest and capacity permit, we plan to:
- expand our Board of Directors from 5 to 9 board members and allow some of our founding members to retire and move to a newly created Advisory Group. The newly expanded board will take a more active role in Kabissa operations as well strategy and sustainability.
- continue to grow our innovative volunteering infrastructure and bring as many quality volunteers through the six month volunteering cycle as possible who bring fresh energy and perspectives from around Africa and the world to Kabissa. We hope they will never completely leave Kabissa again and instead become committed ambassadors that share benefits of Kabissa to organizations in their communities.
- continue to provide the best support we are able to Kabissa member organizations and increase the number of organizations benefitting from Kabissa.
- propose and find funding for paid projects to improve Kabissa. Potential projects on our radar include:
- Improve website performance so web pages load faster, and create a Kabissa distribution of our website code to make security updates and sharing of code easier.
- Add new Open Data interfaces to the Kabissa organization directory to enable people to select and download information in it for offline use and include it as a dataset on their websites.
- Begin producing an annual Kabissa Yearbook containing a snapshot of the organizations in the Kabissa network and their content.
- Add support for Multiple Languages to be more welcoming to African organizations working in non-Anglophone countries.
- Create user-friendly Country and Theme Dashboards that make it really easy to find and make use of the Kabissa organizations and content you need.
- Create Mobile Apps to provide access to Kabissa organizations and content from mobile devices.
Our preferred and most cost-effective methods for receiving donations are through bank checks drawn on US banks (no transaction fees) or credit card via Google Wallet (fee of 2.5% plus 30 cents per transaction).
Kindly make out your check to KABISSA and send it to:
Kabissa
9874 NE Yaquina Avenue
Bainbridge Island, WA 98110
USA
To donate by credit card, start at http://www.kabissa.org/donate
Yes. Kabissa is proud to have a coveted place on Global Giving, a giving platform that connects you to the causes and countries you care about. You select projects you want to support, make a tax-deductible contribution, and get regular progress updates - so you can see how your gift is making a difference.
You can use Global Giving to donate to Kabissa projects while also supporting Global Giving. 15% of donations made via Global Giving go to covering their operations costs.
Yes! To donate using PayPal, please click on the button below:
World Bank Staff and retirees can donate to Kabissa through the Community Connections Campaign and have their donation go twice as far, since the Bank makes a corporate matching contribution to all donations. For details and to donate, please contact Viki Betancourt at (202) 473-9127 or by email vbetancourt@worldbank.org.
Yes! Please designate Kabissa's CFC# 11021 to donate to Kabissa via CFC.
Yes. Online donations to Kabissa are secure.
You can verify that donations are secure by looking for the https at the start of the web address on the page where you enter your credit card details - this means that the connection to the payment processor is encrypted and secure.
Our preferred online payment processor is Google Wallet (previously Google Checkout) which provides excellent tips on Internet Safety (https://checkout.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=105821).
If you have any concerns at all about online donations, please send us a check drawn on a US bank instead or contact donations@kabissa.org.
We have heard reports of problems with Google Checkout/Wallet using iPads and devices that don't support flash. If your transaction fails for any reason, please use an alternate method listed here such as PayPal (which also accepts credit cards and doesn't require a PayPal account) or send us a check. Thanks!
You can call Tobias Eigen, Kabissa founder and executive director, at +1-206-965-9345 or send him an email to donations@kabissa.org with your question and he will get right back to you.