Blockchain for humanitarian aid disbursements | Devcon SEA

[Music] hi I'm roomie I run a blockchain for impact company in um in Nepal and with uh Arun and his team at the UNICEF Innovation fund we've been building and expanding our open-source solution Rahat to streamline Aid delivery and I'm very happy to be here to share our learnings and experiences um last year we piloted a uh response uh to covid uh pilot with uh 1900 households for vulnerable populations and we worked with primarily with the underbanked and unbanked and um with a focus to uh test sms-based cash transfer we worked closely with local government bodies and mobile izers and this Monsoon we've been working with the Danish Red Cross in testing the impact of the solution in anticipate reaction so basically um U looking at timely assistance and information of in flood zone areas um even before the onset of the disaster so we've been using smart contracts and uh um uh with verified uh predefined climate risk triggers for automated uh payout and um uh timely information early warning messages with climate oracles um some of the key learnings that we've had is with what we've learned is like with realtime verifiable data and transparency it's really streamlined the reconciliation process and which has really built on the cost and time efficiency with being able to give in like timely information for early action the other thing that has also been very very uh important that we've realized is the uh the leap frogging of financial inclusion so there's access to finance for vulnerable populations who have not even been introduced to who have not even been able to adopt traditional Financial methods and services uh the challenges that we've seen um has been on the knowledge Gap where there is an onboarding hurdle of humanitarian stakeholders and especially with the local government bodies uh with there is a data um data resource Gap as we are working with limited localized weather information and we've seen there's a need for holistic integration where to make a bigger case for value for the humanitarian stakeholders is to be able to integrate and have the interoperability with their existing tools um and for scalability there are limitations when it comes to because we are working on offchain data in The Last Mile so there is a challenge even though we been able to there is a potential of scaling it to different areas there is a limitation in that and um we've been that's why we've been looking into crypto funds and piloting that on the humanitarian Aid uh delivery to build in transparency and um increase that increase the speed and efficiency of that and I'll pass it to uh Ain to speak more about that thanks to me um yeah so I'm Aron I'm the blockchain lead at the UNICEF office of innovation uh so I work with wonderful teams such as uh ruman then there's xapit and kotane and then so on so many startups who are all working towards Building Solutions that that help uh UNICEF do better at you know what it does so cash transfers is a very important uh part of the equation UNICEF does hundreds of millions of dollars of cash every year uh we also have the crypto fund which has been operating since 2019 uh where we uh custody our own Bitcoin and you know uh ether so far so now zooming out for a second uh this wonderful pilot showed us many many various lessons that we learned from especially how to work with the most vulnerable with the latest technology with The Cutting Edge technology and then we hope to take these lessons to the Future uh where the idea eventually uh once we uh put all the puzzle pieces in place and once we have all the approvals in place uh to use uh crypto hopefully in uh a humanitarian cash transfer pilot so what are the puzzle pieces right so one is a platform such as Rahat to help coordinate all the stakeholders together then you need wallets that can work in low or no internet uh situations and then of course you need uh off- ramping because we still do not live in a world where somebody can just go and buy a piece of bread with a direct crypto peer top payment we are not yet in that in that world uh maybe we'll get to that world later where we don't need any offring partner but as of now we do uh need need them so uh UNICEF is working uh to put various of these puzzle puzzle pieces together and then hopefully we'll have uh something uh interesting uh to uh look forward to where we can actually trial these things out and then hopefully uh bring much needed relief uh to U millions of people worldwide I think that's about it yeah thank you [Applause] thank you both for for for the presentation and thank you for helping the ones that really need it the most so let's have some questions for for these two wonderful people or you can just tell tell them thank you that's also fine yes there use the mic okay you mentioned uh a few of the issues and the puzzle pieces you're trying to solve do you have current examples of how you've been able to address any of them um any of them would be interesting actually yes so we work with startups uh such as uh roomssan who of course work with their own business model to build uh a part of the entire puzzle right so I mentioned two other startups so one is uh EXC capit who we have already worked with so they have built a uh traditional web3 wallet earlier and now they've got a second round of funding from us to build an account abstraction based SMS wallet for reaching those people who do not have a smartphone uh we have already invested in another company called kotane from Kenya so they help off ramping into Mesa so these are some some of the puzzle pieces thank you yes have you noticed any issues with privacy with these organizations since everything is public very good question whoever I mean can yeah so we've um so in Nepal where we've used a um permissioned private chain and um so that sort of has we haven't really delve into that piece yet and that's primarily because of the regulatory challenges we've gotten there and um we're hoping to see if we could have work on the crypto piece and more open regulatory areas but like going into the future in a public blockchain based approach of course privacy is important so we are already very clear that we do not want to store personally identifiable information on chain uh and of course now you have ZK technology and you know whatever so we are looking at how in the future that can be applied yeah yes there's one more question right we have time hi um I was wondering if you guys went through a process to compare other potential Solutions um besides the blockchain and ethereum I was wondering what that process looked like what other things you considered like what the pros and cons of using blockchain were was the question what do we do apart from blockchain yeah any have you considered using any other things except from blockchain for doing the same right okay please keep it short we are yes uh so the UNICEF Venture fund works with Frontier technology blockchain being one of them so we have ai data science uh machine learning drones we used to have augmented reality virtual reality and we will look at other upcoming future Tech as well so so the puzzle pieces are not only blockchain puzzle pieces so we invest in other startups as well we have so far done 80 81 I think 80 81 of these and and right now we have a call out for companies who work in Data Trust and privacy to apply to us for a $100,000 uh Grant so please look it up thank you for sharing that