Building blockchain products for UNICEF. How to get involved. | Devcon Bogotá

foreign [Music] hello everybody welcome to building blockchain products for Unicef how to get involved um my name is Shane O'Connor and I am an innovation manager with unicef's office of innovation which is based in Stockholm in Sweden uh but I'm very happy to be here at devcom with you guys uh probably a lot of you know UNICEF as an organization you know you've heard of us you know what we do maybe it's not so clear exactly why and how we work with blockchain and Technologies in general so unicef's mandate is really to advocate for children's rights and to try and make sure that they achieve the best outcomes and make sure that their health education protection is is maximized across the world and UNICEF operates in about 190 countries around the world but UNICEF also has an office of innovation and within that office of innovation we have a ventures team and we have a a special team called Giga and we'll be hearing from them in a little while go to the next slide so actually UNICEF has been working with blockchain since are looking at blockchain since about 2014 2015. um and UNICEF is one of the larger un organizations so big bureaucratic uh sometimes slow to move so um it takes us a long time to try and get UNICEF to move in this type of space and to get us up to speed on how to properly use the technology that's out there in the real world to support unicef's programming um uh in my own team that I work with the Venture fund uh we have been providing kind of seed funding to support what we call Frontier Technology Solutions that benefit children and the world and we have some people from a few of the companies that have benefited from that here in the room today but really from the slide there you'll see we're looking at the intersection of the needs of one billion people and 100 billion dollar Industries so we look at AI um drones 3D printing machine learning and also blockchain and cryptocurrency we've actually gone through three rounds of blockchain funding cohorts we did our first cohort in about 2018 which was more of a kind of a thematic um call for submissions and you'll see that we had um submissions from Supply Chain Solutions digital certificates and badges impact investing we did a second cohort back in 2020 which was more focused on financial inclusion um and and that kind of particular not not so thematic but more focused um and some of the kind of products platforms and companies that came into that cohort were focused on humanitarian cash transfers remittances and decentralized decision-making tools we have a cohort that is about to be announced in the next one month or so and this is some of the our third cohort around blockchain um and you can see some of the um kind of solutions and companies that have been involved there and uh yeah I think we'll hopefully people can see those coming out pretty soon excellent uh this is really exciting and Asana is going to be giving a talk later on at about 5 40 on the uh the crypto phones I won't take too much of a thunder here but in 2019 uh UNICEF launched uh crypto fund and we were in fact the first UN agency to be able to receive hold and disperse cryptocurrency so this is a a big big thing for the UN and certainly a big big thing for Unicef and this has really been able to help us to build digital Solutions and particularly digital public goods to help us ensure kind of Equitable access to these Technologies and these tools to really try and support human development obviously through the lens of unicef's focus unicef's mandate on supporting children foreign one of the new applications again new for Unicef new for un and using blockchain is a cache based transfers both kind of in a development context supporting social protection schemes but also uh possibly more interesting in humanitarian situations so responding to disasters trying to get funding funds out to communities who've been affected and we're actually at the moment looking at blockchain for cash transfer where in fact I don't know if they're here in the room yet but we do have another cohort graduate that is supporting us Room San from Nepal but using blockchain for cash transfer to really increase uh transparency of these um processes so everyone can see the movement of the funds all the way to the beneficiary and this is interesting for us as a UN agency but also particularly interesting I think to donors too and of course saving costs compared to the traditional aspects for this um this particular space um UNICEF is also looking currently we're using blockchain to support the um the cash transfer programming it's not cryptocurrency at the moment it does get converted to fias but we are hopefully looking at um using pure crypto uh cash trans cash transfers early in 2023 I think that's what we're looking at so my name is uh Herman I lead the blockchain work for Giga at UNICEF um gigas kind of like operates as a little startup within the office of innovation at UNICEF um we were started we started in 2019 um and we're sort of a joint venture between UNICEF and the itu the international telecommunications Union and our goal is to connect all the world schools to the Internet by the year 2030. um so we have quite a lot of work to do and we operate along sort of three pillars of work the first pillar is mapping uh believe it or not we actually don't know where all the schools in the world are so we're using machine learning algorithms to um analyze satellite data and identify schools and actually help governments find all the schools in their country uh so that's always an interesting conversation with the Ministry of Education um the second pillar is about financing so we estimate that it's going to cost approximately 428 billion dollars to connect all the world schools to the internet which is quite a lot of money so we're really investigating uh like Innovative financing models to find sustainable ways to uh to make this happen so there's two types of expenses that uh we have to we have to solve for the first one is obviously sort of capital expenses you know putting fiber in the ground uh putting putting Towers up that sort of thing but the second is you know once you connect to school you have to pay for ongoing internet connectivity you'll sort of have subscriptions to that that's kind of like how it works you have to pay your bills otherwise you get disconnected so we've got a team sort of focusing on on making that happen um and the third pillar is uh about actually connecting so we uh operate a team called the accelerate team where um we work with governments to investigate different kinds of business models for different kinds of scenarios you know schools in urban areas needs a different solution than schools in super rural areas so we work with governments to try to figure that out and advise them on sort of the best way to go um so that they at some point can take over the financing and the rollouts of these programs and do it sustainably so like I said uh we launched in 2019 our goal is to connect all the world schools by 2030. uh so far we were joined by 19 countries um we have connected 5 300 schools we've mapped about 1.1 million out of an estimated 6.

5 so there's still like quite a lot of work to do um and we were super happy to be joined by 14 partners that support us including Ericsson Dubai Keras musk Foundation uh dell recently joined which is a really big deal and we've raised about 210 million dollars uh towards this goal so as you can see we're still quite far off from the 428 billion required um so I'm gonna talk also today a little bit about some of the projects and the products that we're developing at Giga um so the first one is what we call gig accounts which is like a accounting platform and a sort of monitoring platform for the people who uh are actually controlling the money to pay for a school internet connectivity so the way it usually uh happens is that um a country government or a UNICEF country office will write out a contract for like 100 Schools or a thousand schools in a country uh and have very little tools to be able to actually monitor whether this uh internet service is delivered uh so what we're developing is a way for them to make it super easy to monitor that so we um we have our own sort of real-time data uh application that schools can install on their on their networks and reports data back to us so that if data is subpar or connections get disconnected um we can actually hold uh internet service providers accountable so that's uh that's our thing and what we're hoping to go with this is um right now the tools really sort of to support uh support these people in their in their in their work but what will be really cool is to actually connect this with smart contracts and monitor where the internet quality is delivered and if it is automatically pay in 10 service providers so that comes super easy for people to uh to connect schools and to to get paid for that um the second product we're working on is uh called connectivity credits it's kind of um kind of similar to the carbon credit market so we're building a Global Marketplace for uh connectivity um to make the connection of schools sort of more Equitable so what's currently the case in the free market is that schools in rural areas get connected and the ones in urban in urban areas don't or if you're a school in the rainforest an internet service provider isn't gonna like lay a fiber optics cable there so what we're doing is we're um providing a marketplace where we put tokens on these difficult to connect schools and allow internet service providers to redeem these tokens for benefits from the government like for example tax breaks or special deals when uh bidding for uh Spectrum uh bandwidth and that sort of thing so that's currently in progress in in Botswana and we're looking for other countries to uh to implement this um another area that we're investigating uh is nfts so we've launched uh in the beginning of this year uh the first uh first the largest I could say the largest sort of collection within the UN uh for this called Patchwork kingdoms uh it's based on all the school data that we have so for these 1.1 million map schools that we have uh we worked with the data uh artist data analytics artist to create these 1000 unique art pieces uh and raise funds for Giga so uh we sold all of them raised about 700 uh thousand US dollars for that which is really cool and um looking to sort of build upon that uh with our follow-up collection uh currently title in progress called nft2 uh uh where we're basically uh looking to build the world's most comprehensive decentralized database of school data so the idea will be to create an entity for every single School in the world um give this nft for uh to the schools themselves to own and give them the ability together with their communities to edit the data for their school keep it up to date and and own this data themselves so right now it's sort of on our Cloud Server in Frankfurt uh sort of looked up uh and for for us to use but it'd be really cool if schools own their own data so that's where we're hoping to go with that so we're looking to use nfts as a sort of a portal into into making that happen and the last uh projects that were uh actually uh really Keen to talk about uh at this event it's like we're finally allowed to talk about this in public which is really cool is a staking experiment that we've been running uh in Rwanda so um we've been working uh with the ethereum foundation and the the government of Rwanda to create an impact investing product uh using ethereum staking to pay for school connectivity so that's um currently live and uh we'll also be talking about that more in the panel discussion on Thursday if people are interested I think that's it and then I'll hand over ah there's one more so I mean Rome wasn't built in a day uh and these products aren't either uh we're still you know iterating on these uh so we're asking you guys uh do you want to help us build um so Antonio Gutierrez um yeah mentioned us at the previous sort of uh General Assembly so there's really sort of been a global call now for governments to step up and uh and and help with this help with this course to finish with the with the talk before we go into breaking sessions is that we we cannot do this alone we are relatively or fairly small team compared to all the things that we do and all the products that we are building so we work with companies with people on different ways uh one one is that we have a tech team an internal Tech Team of product product managers that the scientists software developers and we are continuously sourcing for that so if you are interested in joining our team keep an eye in our website because you have different jobs that go out there at the moment we have one for a blockchain developer that's open I think it's going to be open for another week or so so if yeah if either you're interested you know anyone that might be interested please just read the word there will be another one for a blockchain product manager Rod as well that will be coming out soon and others will keep coming out so definitely keep an eye on that and and apply we also especially for blockchain work because many of the things that Urban was presenting are so new and they are experiments and prototypes that we are building we work with external companies and with vendors to to build them and then we take them and we scale them internally but we first work with companies to to build them so again if you are a company that's working in the blockchain space either on the nft space it's taking tokens and and others and you are interested in working with us there will be again few calls for companies to apply to help us build the things that Urban was presenting so there will be a one call to help us build this nft2 that doesn't have a name yet so we'll be working with a company too to build that at the same for the accounting platform that he presented kik account we have a working prototype at the moment we'll again be looking for a company to help us build the next version of that and test it by auditing a couple of countries so again if you are in that space of smart contracts Etc feel free to apply and then the last one that will also shortly be coming out it's on the connectivity credits we are building that at the moment in Botswana about looking to Pilot it in couple of other countries so there will be another call looking for companies to build that a token Marketplace for for connectivity and then uh yeah I think those are the main goals that will be coming out of course then we also work with companies as partners so not so much Contracting them but we work with companies like that they must well that's not a company or the mass Foundation Ericsson IHS towers as partners where these these companies give in-kind contributions either funding monetary but also sometimes they give us tech support either through their developers through their team so again if you are interested in helping out a reach out to us and then finally the last one it's the Venture fund so if you are a startup in the blockchain space there are continuous course that are coming out for that there will be one that will go out soon around climate Tech Solutions so if again you are building something on that uh 20th of October it's coming out so so again that will be out and it's an investment of one hundred thousand hundred thousand dollars more or less uh with that I would also encourage you to check this QR code so that you can register like that you can also keep you in the loop and if we have something that we also think that might be relevant to you we can keep you in our Network and reach out to you