Why we built Hop
Distance is the hardest problem in international giving. Hop was built to close it. A live sponsor portal for Haven of Peace, designed and built by Assiz co-founder Zoha Fatema.
Sponsorship asks people to trust what they cannot see
Haven of Peace supports children in Tanzania through a sponsorship model: individuals and families abroad commit to funding a child's care, schooling and daily needs. It works, and it has worked for years. But it asks something difficult of the people funding it: to keep giving, month after month, toward an outcome happening eight thousand kilometres away that they will likely never witness directly.
What sponsors received in return was what most organisations of this size can manage: an occasional email, a photograph, a letter passed through several hands. Sincere, but sparse. And between those updates, a silence that people fill with their own doubts. Not because they distrust the organisation, but because the human mind does not sustain confidence in an absence of information indefinitely.
Meanwhile the staff on the ground, whose actual work is caring for children, were spending hours they did not have assembling those updates by hand.
"Growing up in East Africa, I saw both sides of this. I saw organisations doing extraordinary work with almost nothing. And I saw how easily that work becomes invisible to the people funding it, simply because nobody had the tools to show it."
Zoha Fatema, Co-Founder, Assiz Ltd
Start with who the software has to serve
Hop was not designed as a donor-relations tool. It was designed around three groups whose needs pull in different directions, and the build only works if all three are served at once.
The children come first. Hop holds children's names, ages, grades, addresses and school records. That fact shaped the build rather than being noticed afterwards: the system is private by default, locked behind a password that is not optional, and documented with an explicit warning never to treat the address as a public link. Because Assiz is a UK company handling data about children in Tanzania, the handover documentation sets out what UK GDPR requires: a lawful basis, a privacy notice for sponsors, a written agreement with the orphanage, and a policy for how long records are kept after a child leaves the programme.
None of that is glamorous, and none of it appears in a demo. It is the part that determines whether a system like this should exist at all.
The staff cannot absorb more work. A system that improves sponsor visibility by adding administrative burden to caregivers has moved the problem, not solved it. Hop is handed over with documentation written for someone who does not code: every key, domain and setting is configured through a web form, and the guide names the specific mistakes people make and how to undo them. The measure of success is that Haven of Peace can run and change it without calling us.
The sponsors need continuity, not volume. The goal was never to flood sponsors with information. It was to replace long silences with a steady, quiet signal that the thing they are funding is real and ongoing.
What Hop actually is
Hop is the system Haven of Peace runs to keep sponsors connected to the children they support. Sponsor and student records, communications, payment commitments and scheduled updates live in one password-protected place instead of across spreadsheets, inboxes and memory.
Sponsor and student records
Students are tracked with grades, school records and sponsorship assignments alongside sponsor contact details and payment history. Searchable, exportable, and backed up to a file the organisation controls.
Communication where people actually are
Email through a verified domain and WhatsApp messaging, with reusable templates and a full log of everything sent. WhatsApp matters because it is how this network already communicates.
Updates that send themselves
Messages scheduled for a future date go out on a daily server-side job, whether or not anyone has the app open. Staff schedule a term's updates once rather than remembering each one.
No vendor lock on the AI
Draft-writing runs against Anthropic, OpenAI or DeepSeek, switchable from a settings screen. If a provider gets more expensive, slower or unavailable, the organisation switches without an engineer.
Next.js on Vercel · Password-protected via middleware · Optional shared datastore · Scheduled sending via cron · Provider-agnostic AI
The lesson Hop taught the rest of the portfolio
Hop is the smallest budget Assiz has ever worked to and the build we point to most often. It established something that now runs through every product we ship: the constraint that makes software good is not technical ambition, it is knowing precisely who has to be able to use it, under what conditions, and what it must never do to them.
That principle carried directly into Clinical Smart Scribe, where a clinician reviews every AI-drafted note before it is used, and into the AI Builders Lab, where we collect no student data at all. Different sectors, same discipline.
Hop is live and in daily use. Haven of Peace operates it independently.
Small budget, patchy connectivity, a real duty of care.
That combination is the work we know best, and the work most agencies quietly price themselves out of.