Domi, our product, is a concept for a blockchain-based rental management platform that:

• Enables tenants to ‘passport’ their rental data wherever they relocate (locally, nationally or globally);
• Offers a streamlined and secure means for landlords to manage rental contracts with both local and foreign tenants;
• Enables anonymised reporting of average rental price levels and migration data
• Supports possible open data projects; and
• Can be integrated in yet-to-come digital identity platforms and digital city/government concepts.

UN Women and Innovation Norway, the Norwegian Government’s instrument for innovation and development of enterprises, are partnering to accelerate the achievement of gender equality and women’s empowerment through innovative technology solutions. UN Women’s Deputy Executive Director, Yannick Glemarec, and Innovation Norway’s CEO, Anita Krohn Traaset, signed the first Memorandum of Understanding between the two organizations on March 7, 2017 at a high-level event in Trondheim, Norway, where the guests of honour included the Crown princess Mette Marit and Norway’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Børge Brende.

By the current rate of progress, the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 will not be possible, and women and girls in humanitarian crises impacted contexts are at most risk of being left behind. For example, maternal mortality in humanitarian crises and in fragile settings is 1.9 times the world average, and the number of maternal deaths in these countries represent 61 per cent of the total number of maternal deaths worldwide.

Innovation and technology provide unprecedented opportunities to reach those who are the farthest and hardest to reach by breaking isolation and creating economies of scale to accelerate the achievement of gender equality and women’s empowerment.

By working together, UN Women and Innovation Norway will enhance innovative approaches and solutions in response to addressing gender inequality issues, particularly in humanitarian contexts. The collaboration will also help to identify future public-private partnerships and strengthen the private sector’s engagement in generating innovations.

“During our stay here in Norway we have visited incubators and met with Norwegian entrepreneurs that develop innovative humanitarian solutions that can strengthen women’s empowerment. UN Women believes that this agreement is the beginning of a close partnership that will enable us to build stronger ties between the needs that we identify in our work and the innovative products that are being developed,” said Mr. Glemarec.

The partnership between UN Women and Innovation Norway will create platforms and projects, which will include exploring making blockchain technology work for women and girls. Blockchain technology offers users the ability to build and maintain immutable and secure personal records and to directly transfer digital assets without the need for intermediaries and associated costs. Thus, women and girls in crises will be able to have safe records of documents that are essential to rebuilding their lives and for economic activities. UN Women will participate in a hackathon at the Katapult Future Fest taking place in Norway in May to explore the potential of blockchain as a solution to some of the problems that women face in humanitarian contexts.

“This agreement makes the Norwegian private sector and innovation a bigger part of the solution”, said Norway’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Børge Brende.

Broadly, the collaboration between UN Women and Innovation Norway will focus on:

• Enhancing innovative approaches and solutions to address gender inequality issues;
• Promoting women, especially marginalized groups, as both producers and consumers of innovations;
• Promoting public-private partnerships and strengthening the private sector’s engagement in innovations to accelerate gender equality and women’s empowerment, notably through competency building and knowledge sharing;
• Sharing best practices, methodologies, and lessons learned around innovations to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment;
• Promoting the Sustainable Development Goals.

UN Women believes that strong partnerships such as this, can help women and girls to design, shape and benefit from the technological transformations and innovations changing our world.  (Source: unwomen.org)

Pilot 

UN Women, in partnership with the UN Office of Information and Communications Technology (UN OICT) and with the support of Innovation Norway, hosted a four-day simulation lab to explore cutting-edge solutions based on blockchain technologies that address challenges faced by women and girls in humanitarian settings.

“Being the only UN agency created in the 21^st century, UN Women has prioritized innovation technology as one of the drivers for change, strategically leveraging innovation and partnership to accelerate progress towards gender equality and women’s empowerment,” said Yannick Glemarec, UN Women Deputy Executive Director, during the opening session.

Natural disasters and conflicts exacerbate pre-existing gender inequalities and discriminations experienced by women and girls, heightening their vulnerability, and exposing them to disproportionately high levels of risk. At the same time, women also play a critical role in enabling effective, efficient and sustainable humanitarian response.

UN Women, together with partners, such as Innovation Norway, is committed to ensuring that humanitarian action responds to the needs and challenges of women and girls and leverages their active participation and leadership. While there has been some progress in this area, there remain significant gaps. Calling for “radical innovation,” Elisabeth Fosseli Olsen, Head of Humanitarian Innovation Initiatives, Programmes and Grants at Innovation Norway reminded participants, “there are too many people left behind in today’s humanitarian efforts.” Harnessing technologies such as blockchain is one of many ways that UN Women is working to strengthen humanitarian action.

Blockchain is a distributed database of immutable digital records that can be accessed from anywhere. It offers users the ability to build and maintain immutable and secure records and to directly transfer digital assets without the need for intermediaries and associated costs.

These attributes enable blockchain to be used to create and store verifiable digital identity for refugees as well as enable trackable and inexpensive cash transfers. As humanitarian crisis continues to be protracted over decades, with millions of people on the move, technology like blockchain can provide solutions to immediate and long-term challenges.

During the four-day event at the UN Women Headquarters in New York, seven blockchain technology solution-providers demonstrated their solutions to over 200 UN officials, representatives from Permanent Missions to the UN, blockchain technologists, humanitarian actors and academics.

Among the various areas of potential innovation and investment, UN Women has identified cash transfer and identity as areas to leverage blockchain technology to assist women and girls. UN Women will invite selected vendors to submit a ‘request for proposal’, after which the most suitable solutions will be piloted in humanitarian crisis settings. Supported by Innovation Norway, UN Women is committed to ensuring that this process continues to progress in close collaboration with UN and private sector partners.

“History shows that trends can be broken with innovation in policy, institutions, management models, finance, science and technology. Making innovation work for women is a key objective of UN Women,” said Mr. Glemarec. “Digital technologies can provide unprecedented solutions to address the fundamental needs of marginalized groups and those at the bottom of the pyramid.”

(Source: unwomen.org)

Fummi is a Smart ID built on blockchain. Fummi enables authorized payments and access to benefits.

Fummi, Blockchain for Change’s first product, is a mobile application designed to provide low-cost financial services through cooperative purchasing partnerships for low-income and underserved individuals. These interactions use what we call a SmartID: a proprietary protocol for enabling a certified authority to verify identity on the blockchain. This method of verification called the Change Pass verifies a user’s access to the Fummi marketplace and enables secure transactions and safe storage of money and information.

Change Coin
The Change Coin is an ERC 20 token that is used as a currency within the Fummi ecosystem. The Change Coin functions as an access point and transaction mechanism between users, service providers, and the Fummi
platform. Within that system, the Change Coin is set up to encourage value-creating activity via behavioral incentives. For example, when a user’s SmartID is stored on the platform/blockchain, the user receives a reward of 30 Change Coins for successfully onboarding onto the platform.

Fummi harnesses blockchain technology to redefine the usage of digital identity for financial services. These financial services provide low-cost specialized interactions for users opening the doors to the digital economy.
Service providers have access to a cooperative network, which grants organizational transparency and auditability (which enables low-cost services). Due to the inherent fraud prevention and management of encrypted data on the permitted blockchain, service providers are incentivized to secure their users’ data with our SmartID. Originators of user data are rewarded in Change Coin when other service providers utilize the user IDs for services.

Users use their SmartID to interact and transact with providers. This identity permits users to store money safely, access new opportunities such as building a alternative credit score, and getting discounted services from service providers. The record of interactions itself drives the Fummi attestation strategy, validating the SmartID data and applicability. The embedded Fummi SmartWallet (Users’ secure and protected record of accountability and transaction history), further offers a mobile financial services tool, which operates much like a more flexible bank account.

Virtually unhackable the currency offers the highest level of security and is a UK founded crypto currency. Women’s Coin® creates a virtuous market place for women to meet, share ideas, support and product offering. The Women’s Coin Foundation (WCF) supports UN empowerment principles, delivering access to education for women and girls worldwide through blockchain technology. The Women’s Coin Foundation (WCF) will also provide invaluable access to finance and business support for women’s small and medium enterprises.

Over three years, the company developed several projects. The main one is Amply, a set of blockchain implementations that will allow the government of South Africa to manage Early Childhood Developments Services better.

Early Childhood Development Services is a network of state-funded special centres that help children from the lower strata of South African society to socialise, foster various skills and enter state schools. According to official data, Early Childhood Development centres provide communities with different services from basic nutrition assistance to teacher development programs.

Amply project will use a distributed ledger to improve the documentation system in the network of state-coordinated centres.

“Amply is using blockchain technology to improve Early Childhood Development (ECD) services in South Africa. Using blockchain infrastructure and smart contracts, we prototyped a system that will help strengthen the current registration, contracting, information and management systems,” states the company.

In the following year, 9needs will conduct a test use of blockchain at 50 ECD centres in South Africa. The company applied for a newly-established UNICEF grant program and won $100,000. 9needs will invest the money in the implementation of the project.

This is the first-ever investment into a blockchain company through the UNICEF Innovation Fund, which is

“…A new way of doing business at the UN; combining the approach of Silicon Valley venture funds with the needs of UNICEF programme countries. The Fund allows us to prototype technology solutions, as well as expand our networks of open source collaborators to improve children’s lives,” explains Cynthia McCaffrey, Director of the UNICEF Office of Innovation.

Previously, the international organisation declared its readiness to experiment with the blockchain technology. Now it chose 9needs for the first investment.

Using Stellar’s open-source protocol, Praekelt is working on a mobile wallet that allows people to save cash or airtime using Vumi, their messaging platform—think Whatsapp, but open source and designed for the developing world, with a focus on improving the economic security of girls in South Africa.

Why girls?

In the developing world, only 37% of women have bank accounts. Research from Women’s World Banking has shown that poor women are inherent savers, putting away 10-15% of their earnings for emergencies. Due to a lack of financial services, however, they’re forced to save in unreliable and sometimes expensive ways—women often hide cash in their homes, where it isn’t secure, or buy livestock, which can become ill or die.

We believe that low-cost and reliable methods for savings could have an enormous impact on women, as well as on their families and communities.

Vumi already powers South Africa’s national maternal healthcare program, MomConnect, which sends expectant mothers prenatal health information over the course of their pregnancies. After a successful launch in South Africa last year, Praekelt is introducing the service in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. Since its founding, Praekelt’s programs have reached over 50 million people across 15 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

Mayor Jesse Arreguín and City Councilmember Ben Bartlett are heading this project in conjunction with campus Blockchain Lab and with Neighborly, a technology firm that aims to reimagine municipal finance for the contemporary landscape. Berkeley plans to use blockchain, a digital technology that creates a ledger of economic transactions, to create bonds for funding affordable housing projects.

“Neighborly is building a crypto-enabled technology stack that will offer a new, customizable structure to finance critical community projects in the form of a new class of cryptoassets: cryptobonds,” said Kiran Jain, Neighborly’s chief operating officer, in an email.

BBI entails the creation of a municipal bond using blockchain technology. This involves an “initial community offering,” analogous to the initial coin offering used to crowdfund cryptocurrency, which allows Berkeley to take control of fundraising, according to Jain.

Community members can purchase digital tokens backed by municipal bonds. If the plan succeeds, Berkeley will be the first city to issue cryptocurrency.

“Issuers like Berkeley could use cryptobonds to finance affordable housing and the critical social services that Berkeley needs to address its growing homelessness population while meeting the needs of the socially-minded Berkeley investor,” Jain said in an email.

Berkeley has about 1,000 homeless people and increasingly high rents. Arreguín and Bartlett have both named homelessness as a key issue in their platforms.

“We’re not going to accept that there’s no money, we’re going to create it,” Bartlett said. “Blockchain technology is the future of public finance and human economic interactions.”

Cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, are based off blockchain technology. Bitcoin has garnered recent attention for its large fluctuations in value, rising from $1,000 to $19,000 and back down to $8,000 since January 2017. This has brought its reliability into question, which Bartlett refutes.

“Because it’s not a coin, it’s a bond, there will be no fluctuation in price,” Bartlett said. “The blockchain platform is secure.”

The project will be privately funded, with guidance from city officials. Neighborly is underwriting this project, according to Bartlett.

“We feel that since this new economy is emerging, Berkeley should shape it,” Bartlett said. “We have the human ethic to make sure the human economy is just and results in shared prosperity.”

It is a digital identity blockchain application being used to replace an existing paper-based system to register children for a government funded pre-school subsidy in South Africa. Service providers use the mobile app to verify children’s attendance at classes and to capture other useful information. This will increase trust in the funding mechanism and make funding available to more children who need it. It will save administration time and costs..

The Cape Town organization, which is running a pilot with South African preschoolers, creates immutable digital identities to help children in Africa receive educational services and subsidies.

Project Amply strives to revolutionize early childhood development in Africa. Combining mobile and blockchain technology to increase impact and accountability of public services and generate real-time data.

OUR MISSION
Amply is a digital identity protocol that builds trust. We provide every child with their own self-sovereign digital identity based on the blockchain. This will enable children to receive benefits and services that they might have previously been excluded from.

In our pilot project, Amply is being used to replace an existing paper-based system to register children for a government funded pre-school subsidy in South Africa. Service providers use a mobile app to verify children’s attendance at classes and to capture other useful information. This will increase trust in the funding mechanism and make funding available to more children who need it. It will save administration time and costs. And it will provide really useful information about how and where services are being delivered.

Amply is unique in that it places each individual child at the centre of their relationships with Early Childhood Development services in a way that is ‘self-sovereign’ and directly beneficial to them. This means that a child’s digital identity and personal data are privately owned and controlled by the individual (with some help from their guardians). Over time, their life records become a rich source of data and value that can be used to receive services and insights that will become more predictive, precise, personalised, preventive, and participatory.

With consented access to personal data and identity assurance, entirely new classes of innovative applications can be developed for both local physical and distant virtual services. This is a big deal for growing a web of trust around children, to meet their developmental needs.

We use digital identities to
– gather real-time data and link it to sovereign identities
– increase efficiency and quality of public services for children
– create accountable blockchain based subsidies management platforms