In recent weeks and now months, we have had to observe the dramatic developments in Afghanistan. You are in close contact with your family and friends there. What is the local situation like?

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to express my thoughts regarding the situation in Afghanistan. Of course it is baffling to see how quickly everything escalated and how overnight the fate of an entire country went upside down. I have been in constant contact with my family, friends and colleagues on the ground and trying to be as helpful as I can from here. Despite the whole chaos, distress and uncertainty at least there seems to be a significant decrease in violence which is a silver lining of sorts, but people are hope and perspective less and are living in a dire situation where they don’t know what tomorrow will bring. I know that with such an immense transformation we need to be patient to see and experience what will come, but for the common person who lives from daily wages or paycheck to paycheck it is a matter of survival and it is devastating to see.

Can you briefly describe the most important projects you have launched in Afghanistan in the last years? What is the current status of these projects?

We founded Startupistan as a grassroot entrepreneurship community in Kabul in 2018 and the goal has been to encourage entrepreneurship and adapt technology for good. We started as a small online community to test and find the first few like minded people so that we can have ambassadors on the ground which slowly slowly become more formal and in the last couple of years we have developed a local Digital Skills school, a coworking space and a small Incubator for Startups. We have hosted a range of conferences and hackathons on a range of relevant topics to create awareness and prototype solutions for local problems.

Currently our whole team is still on the ground, but our campus remains closed. We are observing the developments and will act accordingly, but to put things into perspective we remain committed to Afghanistan and will continue to operate. We are currently adapting our offerings and are looking for ways to offer our service to both women and men equally.

Are there possibilities to help from abroad in the very confusing and dynamic situation? What can be done to help and support the people in Afghanistan?

I believe the first thing that is currently missing in Afghanistan is ‘Hope’. The very first thing we can do is to morally support the millions of Afghans who are totally hopeless and are currently leading an uncertain life. More concretely, ways of help can be asking governments to help evacuate people whose lives are in danger, but also not to forget the millions of people who will still remain in Afghanistan, this can be the biggest humanitarian crisis, so we have to act now and deploy support. Of course donation to initiatives that are on the ground can be a good immediate help. 

Do you see a role for blockchain technology in defusing the crisis in Afghanistan? Can we network and support a tech community to develop and disseminate such tools?

I believe in a situation like this blockchain can play a very vital role, decentralized and Autonomous Organizations and peer to peer solutions are key for having a thriving community in uncertain times like these. Unfortunately we also have to take into account the local context of Afghanistan, we lack infrastructure and expertise on the ground, so there is a big need for support and network, the global community needs to come together and help prototype solutions, we are currently looking into a peer to peer payment solution and will be happy to have exchange of ideas on this. 

Thank you so much for your time! How can we best follow your work?

Thanks again for giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts. You can learn more about Startupistan here startupistan.org and if you looks to have a chat you can reach our via LinkedIn.

Our crowdfunding campaign is still on: Startupistan.org/100 also if you would like to make a donation if crypto please reach out at mozamel (at) startupistan and we will send you the instructions. Please note that we have a registered non-profit in Germany and we can issue donation receipts for tax benefits.

Sandra Uwantege-Hart

Sandra Uwantege Hart is the Pacific Cash & Livelihoods Lead for Oxfam, based in Vanuatu. She founded and leads the Unblocked Cash project at Oxfam in addition to managing a regional portfolio of humanitarian cash transfer response and preparedness projects. She has 11+ years of experience in natural disaster response and coordination and has worked in emergency and recovery operations in the Pacific, Asia, the Caribbean, and West Africa.  Sandra is a DevCon Scholar (2019) and Regional Ambassador at the Global Blockchain Council. She is a dual citizen of Rwanda and the USA. 

PB: Can you first tell us a little bit about what problems your project is tackling?

SH: The biggest problem is that aid delivery and relief efforts are not very efficient; They are expensive (it costs up to $3 to deliver $1 of in-kind aid, like food), slow (can take weeks to reach the remote areas), and not very transparent (which leads to donors’ mistrust and disengagement). This project was born in the Pacific Islands, which creates extremely context logistical challenges, with over 20,000 islands across a massive region into which you can literally fit the landmass of all 7 continents. The financial infrastructure and access to finance – which would enable the delivery of cash at a lower cost – is underdeveloped and simply doesn’t work for everyone. Finally, people affected by crises are rarely given the power to decide about themselves and are not included in the process of designing the programs, tools, and solutions to the problems they know best.  The Pacific is host to multiple natural hazards – climate change, cyclones, earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis. So for us, it’s not a question of if a disaster will happen – it’s a question of when. 

“The financial infrastructure and access to finance – which would enable the delivery of cash at lower cost – is underdeveloped and simply doesn’t work for everyone”

Oxfam staff Kalua shows the online dashboard to ADRA, World Vision and Red Cross partners at Sarakata registration site. (Photo: Oxfam in Vanuatu/Arlene Bax)

… and how does it work and what impact does it make? 

The Unblocked Cash project has been successful in tackling these issues. It is a fast, less expensive, transparent, and community-centric system to deliver much-needed recovery payments to people affected by natural disasters. It offers an opportunity to improve the efficiency of how aid is delivered without compromising transparency and sustainability and by integrating digital financial inclusion and utilization of decentralized networks for a more collaborative economy at the community level. It consists of three elements: e-voucher “tap-and-pay” cards used by beneficiaries, an Android Sempo app through which vendors receive the payments, and the Sempo online platform where NGOs and partners can monitor transactions remotely and in real-time. All transactions are recorded on the Ethereum blockchain. What we have effectively built here is a digital ‘last mile’ solution that can reach across islands and oceans to reach those for whom traditional solutions are typically inaccessible.

With our solution, we are on track to reach 35,000 people in 2020 (Q4 only) and scaling across the Pacific region from Vanuatu to Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands (in 2021). Although the solution was born in the Pacific, it’s not exclusive to it, and the project is already being piloted by Oxfam Colombia, with Oxfam Mexico and Oxfam Ireland being the next teams to use the solution. 

“With our solution, we are on track to reach 35,000 people in 2020 (Q4 only) and scaling across the Pacific region from Vanuatu to Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands (in 2021).”

How did you get to work on it? What brought you, a humanitarian, to the blockchain space?

When I starting dreaming up this solution, I was actually jobless – I had quit my previous job with the UN, disillusioned, feeling constrained, undervalued, and burned out. So, I had a lot of time to think – and the spark started with the documentary Banking on Bitcoin – which then led to what I call ‘blockchain fever’. It’s the rabbit hole of trying to understand the technology and getting that gleam in your eye, seeing it as potentially transformative. I did a deep dive of learning all I could – podcasts, white papers, blogs, etc. I actually remember the moment when I connected this with humanitarian cash assistance. I was sitting by the seaside in Fiji and realised that the most successful applications of blockchain technology – currency, financial transactions and the facility of exchange across networks of people all over the world – were actually, pretty close to what I try to do for a living. How to make it easier for me to transact with thousands of people at once, and help them transact with each other? I had all sorts of crazy diagrams and notes, and even my own little white paper. 

I am really just invested in getting help to people as quickly and as easily as possible. I used to work – for many years – in the delivery of food assistance in response to major natural disasters and eventually started working on the delivery of cash and financial services. Why? Because it’s just more dignified, and it is logistically easier. It also just makes more sense – as humans, we created currency and the exchange of money to better transact with each other, and this is truly universal. It cuts across humanitarian, development, and economic assistance.

Where do you currently see the biggest gaps in humanitarian aid? Can you name & describe the top 3 issues?

Over the last years, I have had a lot of improvement in the practices of the sector. More and more assistance comes in the form of cash (and vouchers), which has been proven to be cheaper, more effective, and a dignified means of assisting people in need. However, even if the entire sector would transition to cash modality, there are still the same underlying issues and room for improvement.  

• Costs – even if we go fully digital, the cost of remittances and fees of FSP are staggering at the scale that humanitarian organizations operate. On average,  the cost of delivery almost always outweighs the cost of what we are delivering, especially when that is in the form of goods. This is in the context of an environment where investments in foreign aid and humanitarian assistance are declining, while the frequency and scale of humanitarian crises are multiplying  – so we have to do more, with less. 
• Long times to deliver assistance – in case of natural disasters the time is money; fast access to food, clean water, shelter and hygiene products can prevent the outbreak of diseases, which have often followed the initial catastrophe and made the scale of the crisis bigger. One thing is to set up the response program fast, but the next thing is to ensure that beneficiaries receive assistance fast. This can prove particularly difficult in remote areas.
• Transparency & traceability – the problem with transparency is not the lack of audits of NGOs, which have usually very rigorous standards. It is rather a problem of the system design, the supply chain of assistance, which ends abruptly without giving us data/insights into the generated impact. How many times have we asked or heard the question after seeing multi-million dollar aid pledges…Where did that money go?  Although e-vouchers or mobile-money are a great improvement, as they offer new data and transparency, they have their limitations, too, and they remain designed by mobile service providers whose target clients are not our target beneficiaries. The data is not tamper-proof, cannot be accessed fully and in detail, and cannot be accessed in real-time. Therefore any irregularities cannot be solved on the spot. That’s where blockchain has its advantage over the existing digital solutions.

Market vendors. Santo, Vanuatu (Photo: Oxfam in Vanuatu, Arlene Bax)

Is this where do you see the biggest impact of blockchain technology in the aid sector? 

Honestly, I’m not sure, as there are a lot of areas of improvement and dozens of potential applications I can think of. I do think however, that this is the first, and easiest entry point. It’s a low hanging fruit in a sector that is moving quickly to replace “in-kind” assistance with cash, and that is confronted with the difficulties of doing so. So, the introduction of this solution at a time when that global shift is happening, but is difficult, is easier to welcome. I would see this as having the biggest impact of blockchain technology in the sector in the short term, also because digital finance and cryptocurrency are part of the most mature areas of blockchain technology generally. 

Other really promising applications can likely grow from this organically more easily than they can grow independently – by doing projects like UnBlocked Cash, we are introducing more and more humanitarian professionals to a new area of knowledge and a new skill, which will also give birth to new solutions, hopefully some of which I can’t even think of right now! But for those I can think of that are not like UnBlocked Cash, these are projects around digital identities for displaced populations, refugees and stateless persons; the use of automation, algorithms and smart-contracting for predictive disaster response and delivery; and creating systems that make the donation process more direct and transparent – from the donation point down to how someone on the ground uses it. Those are the use cases in my opinion, with the most promise.

Ray paying for taxi ride with e-card to the taxi driver and the Unblocked Cash vendor Alroy (Photo: Oxfam in Vanuatu, Arlene Bax)

There is some talk about a digital gap that might even become bigger as even more sophisticated tech is utilized in humanitarian and development initiatives.  What is your response to this?

Well, very honestly, if we are doing our job properly, we should be making sure this does not happen, period. Participation, access and inclusion are all core parts of the humanitarian approach and if this use of technology gets separated from that, we have failed. This is precisely why we (Oxfam and Sempo) chose to take an approach that integrates community participation in product iteration and that enhances digital access and literacy in that process – to make sure that the solution has a built-in role for the people least likely to be able to access the technology. 

This is also where the best product development, design and deployment systems are made. I am a deep believer – having been born and raised in emerging economies, I am totally convinced that the best and most successful innovations are born out of hardship. It is a luxury to have systems that work for you – those who know how it feels when they don’t are the ones constantly thinking of solutions – to be able to earn an income, raise a family, and put food on the table. To hustle. So, the more we can ensure that the communities we work with and in are involved in the process, the better these solutions will be. For me, that is the gateway to mass adoption.

Beneficiaries registration, Santo, Vanuatu, 21.10.2020 (Photo: Oxfam in Vanuatu, Arlene Bax)

A lot of projects are currently emerging with a keen focus on technological innovation. What other areas need to be done right in order to create a lasting impact? 

Involve the community you are serving – or, users – throughout the entire process. Design with and for its users. In Vanuatu, which is a testing ground for the project, we have worked with local teams, partners, vendors, and card users on designing the solution, piloting, and iterating it, as well as testing our training materials. 

We didn’t do it consciously, but once I was made aware of that, we actually did follow the Human Centered-Design & Design Thinking principles in building and developing this program. And we continue to do so, gathering feedback, iterating different components if possible.  Whatever we learn in Vanuatu, we share with our colleagues in other teams, so that every project can build on top of our lessons and ideas. 

“In Vanuatu, which is a testing ground for the project, we have worked with local teams, partners, vendors and card users on designing the solution, piloting, and iterating it, as well as testing our training materials. “

Secondly – this approach requires diversity in the design. This goes back to my reply to the last question – the tech sector is terribly NOT diverse. Not a lot of women, not a lot of people of color, not a lot of LGBTIQ+ peoples, not a lot of people from disadvantaged backgrounds or the Global South. Not a lot of people who don’t speak English (even as a second language). That is a major problem because it means that the people who need new solutions and bring a diversity of thought to the table the most are not the ones building them. Diversity in the teams that create these innovations is critical. Very personally – when I don’t see diversity in those teams, I’m immediately skeptical of how good the solution is.

How can we best follow your work?

You can follow our updates from the field and stories from our users, across social media:

Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Medium. We also have a telegram group (@unblockedcash) dedicated to any questions, discussions, and feedback. Or, you can find me on LinkedIn or  email me: sandrah (at) oxfam.org.au 

Thank you for sharing with us!

PositiveBlockchain: Would you like to help research impactful blockchain for social good projects? Explore our open database to see the projects already listed, and if you have any tips to share, feel free to get in touch with our team.

PositiveBlockchain: The Covid-19 pandemic has put the fragility of healthcare systems under public spotlight. According to the Africa CDC, over 1.4 million infection cases have been reported across the continent of Africa. Yet, global humanitarian relief bodies such as the IRC believe the true scale of the pandemic may be hidden because of a lack of testing and issues with data. This, however, highlights one of the many challenges in long-term healthcare transformation in developing regions. Can innovative solutions tackle the issues of data access, healthcare inclusion, service delivery and trust at the same time?

For the South Africa-based team of Ribbon Blockchain, healthcare ecosystems are critical to not only people’s well-being, but also social equity. Using blockchain technology to tokenize healthcare activities, Ribbon has set out to incentivise behavioural change and improve accessibility of quality data, thereby improving the resilience and vitality of public health systems that serve everyone, particularly the poor.

Today, we talk to Gugu Newman, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer at Ribbon Blockchain Pty Ltd, a for-profit, social impact company specialized in public health system automation.

Gugu is the vision lead behind Ribbon’s Public Health Incentives platform, which is designed to improve health system automation, efficiency, productivity and self-sustainability in public health systems in emerging economies. Gugu has over 23 years of work experience across the fields of product design, manufacturing, technology and media business sectors; including over five years as an entrepreneur.

Can you first tell us a little bit about your solution/ project/ initiative outside the current crisis: Which problem is it tackling, how does it work and what impact does it make? How did you get to work on it?

Ribbon’s Universal Public Health Incentivization platform seeks to improve the non-adherence to chronic medicine, and reduce poor health-related behavior. The platform is designed to improve public health systems by automating and enforcing quality rating of every single Patient-Healthworker interaction experience, and rewarding both parties for effort, efficiency, accuracy, productivity and accomplishment of specific tasks within set timelines to improve health outcomes.

For example, we use blockchain to pool and tokenize donor funding from fiat currencies into Dai stablecoin cryptocurrency pegged at 1:1 with the US Dollar, which we then re-distribute as Crypto rewards to patients, practitioners and community health workers for completing specific healthcare activities, such as testing for HIV and TB, initiating and adhering to prescribed medicines and treatment. All activities are recorded on the Ethereum blockchain as transactions stored in a decentralized database, generating real-world and real-time population health data and context of the healthcare ecosystem.

The socio-economic impact promised by our platform is improved adherence, behavior change, improved health outcomes, longer comfortable life for chronic patients and an efficient, self-sustainable public health system offering great quality of care delivery equal to or above private healthcare.

We began working on this platform after having been on the receiving end of poor public health services and having unfortunately lost family members to mis-diagnoses and incompetence in public health systems in Africa. The act of creating the Ribbon Public Health Platform was really our fight back, and a stand that no other life should be lost to the same negligence in public health.

How has the Covid-19 crisis affected your life and work so far?

Covid-19 has slowed down our work as public health facilities have been re-organized to put more emphasis and focus on Covid-19 patients and priorities and operation under a state of emergency, thus relegating all other health related issues and technologies to the back. This has made it difficult to implement new technology across the public health system and relegated novel innovations to the back seat.

We are hopeful however that as the peak of the pandemic subsides, we will find a way to work smoothly within the new normal.

How do you think the crisis will affect our life and work further down the line?

I think the crisis has exposed the lack of technological innovation and financial investment into public health, which was up to this point a very little understood or cared for sector, and perhaps we will see more innovation and general investment into health and lifestyle related areas of the economy. 

Health will likely become a standard investment item or expense entry in the business balance sheet, and health data could also make a new entry as a revenue item in balance sheets of companies with large workforces, customers and communities. A technology like blockchain enables transparency and tamper-proof capabilities to enable this new post-Covid world where healthy lifestyle tracking and data collection are core fundamentals of daily business practice.

In light of COVID19, how have you adapted work? Could you share examples of new or additional challenges you are working on, or of adjustments / additions you have made to your solutions related to the crisis?

We have learnt quite a lot from our efforts in pivoting to offer Covid-19 solutions in our platform. We figured out a very important milestone of how to integrate Covid-19 Track and Trace Bluetooth technology into our platform for remote data collection and for tracking people with intermittent internet access.

This ability opens up a whole new world of possibilities in remote data collection via Bluetooth enabled wearable wrist bands and mobile phones as well as via beacon technology. We are actively looking for investments into developing this pivot further.

How are you planning to develop it further? What are the biggest obstacles you need to overcome?

The biggest obstacles are finding the right investors to fund the research and development of how this Track and Trace Bluetooth technology interacts with blockchain framework, and to find developers who can engineer backwards to make this technology compatible with older non-Android & iOS mobile phones that do not have smartphone capability or internet access but do have Bluetooth. 

This business model might also not be financially viable since technology always moves forward, so it might just be a case of onboarding old users onto wearable Bluetooth bracelets, but the cost and time it will take to get users en masse onto that is another problem altogether.

Photo: Unsplash

Where do you see the biggest opportunities of blockchain and other technologies in relation to Covid-19? Where do you see risks?

Opportunities:

• I’m gonna be biased here and say I see behavior change incentives distributed via blockchain in public health becoming the new standard for public health
• I also foresee public health providing the utility that blockhain’s DeFI ecosystem (decentralized finance) lacks in real world settings, and this is something we’re designing and looking to incorporate into our business model.
  
• Health data sovereignty via blockchain could also become a thing
  
• Track and Trace Bluetooth technology for health and lifestyle will definitely become the standard to power future remote data collection efforts
  
• AI and machine learning for data analytics and information insights in public health are already in use and poised to expand
  

Risks:

• Health information privacy and security is already a big risk and will continue to be
  
• The potential ‘colonization’ of health data by Facebook, Google, Amazon and such other big platforms is still a huge risk to data ownership and beneficiation. I think governments will have to implement national policies to protect citizens against these giants
  
• I think it’s also very important to decentralize and reconfigure public health systems to become ‘Patient-First’-oriented and enforce personalized medicine through use of blockchain, if we are ever to improve the health of large populations and avert or survive future pandemics.
  
  

How can we best follow your work?

You can follow Ribbon Blockchain on Twitter @RibbonPlatform and our website https://ribbonblockchain.com/ and contact me directly via email on [email protected]

Thank you, Gugu, for sharing with us!

PositiveBlockchain: Would you like to help research impactful blockchain for social good projects in Africa? Explore our open database to see the projects already listed, and if you have any tips to share, feel free to get in touch with our team.

The United Nations Development Programme recently reported that the ongoing pandemic is “hitting hard on all of human development’s constitutive elements”, such as loss of income at a scale not seen since the Great Depression, loss of lives or damage to well-being at an astounding scale, disrupted access to education, all “likely increasing poverty and inequalities at a global scale”, making achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals even more urgent.


Photo: Castorly Stock from Pexels

Over the coming months, PositiveBlockchain will launch a broad selection of interview series related to how companies in the blockchain for social impact ecosystem are adapting their solutions or projects in this next phase of sustainable development. The series will focus on interviewing inspiring change-makers from different organisations, who provide inspiration and insights on how to address the multi-faceted and far-reaching socio-economic development challenges intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Today, we talk to Kevin Pettit, Chief Operating Officer of Proof of Impact, a company providing verified impact investing solutions.

Kevin Pettit, Chief Operating Officer, brings infectious energy to everything he does. He brings to bear a strong background in blockchain, finance and technology to the Proof of Impact team. His successful track record of launching and accelerating financial systems is fueled by his unyielding commitment towards advancing high-performance teams to rapidly deliver growth. His deep passion for social impact led him here and his desire to rigorously disrupt the impact space as we know it keeps him going.

Can you first tell us a little bit about Proof of Impact outside the current crisis: Which problem is it tackling, how does it work and what impact does it make? How did you get to work on it?

At our core, Proof of Impact is a technology company that enables the tracking, measurement, and evaluation of impact investments. To dive in a bit deeper, we have developed a data collection and verification engine that is radically redefining impact as we know it – by using transparent and meaningful metrics to create natural alignment between purpose and profit. 

We quickly saw that the hearts and minds of consumers and investors are becoming more impact-minded, yet the tools to bring those visions to life lag behind. Frustrated with the conversations being had but little to no outcomes, we decided to tackle this issue head on. Backed by co-founders who are serial impact entrepreneurs, one with deep expertise in investment banking, we listened to the market and committed ourselves to developing the technological innovations needed to make investing in impact tangible, transparent, and verifiable. 

Focused on four key areas – impact investing, responsible manufacturing, philanthropic giving, and corporate social responsibility – our solution is tailored to the specific needs of those looking for new age digitized investment products. We proudly provide a customizable technology platform and visibility into key impact performance data to help fund managers and impact-minded professionals make more conscious decisions in everyday life.

Photo: Proof of Impact supporting maternal health services provided in Africa.

How has the Covid-19 crisis affected your life and work so far?

Let’s be honest. COVID-19 has left a lot of people feeling alone and helpless. Many of us felt ‘stuck,’ with little ability to take control and determine how to make a meaningful difference.

Logistically speaking, we built Proof of Impact to be a fully remote company, so daily life in that regard did not change too drastically, however the feeling of helplessness is something that my team – and mostly every team around the globe – has felt. We see this tidal wave on the news of how bad things are, and it’s hard to determine what our role is in helping be part of the solution. 

Things took a turn for the positive once my team and I decided to squarely focus on using our technology to give people an option to participate in the solution. That’s where the dramatic shift occurred. Our conversations changed and became highly action oriented. We creatively found positive ways to come together – from daily Zoom workouts which forced us to take a break from work to having check-ins with one another around how we were truly doing – we rallied together and have found ways to focus on the positive in an otherwise bleak time.

How do you think the crisis will affect our life and work further down the line?

COVID-19 has already accelerated the need for greater purpose beyond ourselves. Business as usual simply no longer exists. No longer can we ignore the consequences of doing things in the same ways, with no regard for the greater good. 

We can easily go down the line and discuss the negative ways COVID is – and will – impact society, but I like to believe that this will enable most people to tap into a higher level of consciousness. Prior to this global pandemic and subsequent crisis, impact was something of a self-realization prophecy, whereas now we’ve realized that doing good is much more of a basic human need than most once thought. 

I’d like to think the way we make decisions going forward has forever changed, in a very meaningful way.

Photo: In one of the projects supported by Proof of Impact, meals are being packed up and delivered to frontline healthcare workers.

In light of COVID19, how have you adapted work? Could you share examples of new or additional challenges you are working on, or of adjustments / additions you have made to your solutions related to the crisis?

When COVID appeared, the team and I realized rather rapidly that we had the ability to be relevant in a genuinely meaningful way. We sent ourselves into overdrive to address the crisis head on, by pointing our impact tracking and verification technology to track impact related to COVID relief.

For example, Proof of Impact partnered with United 4 Longevity (U4L), a new charitable foundation that collects funds to underwrite the donation of clean, nutritious foods to healthcare workers who are currently risking their lives in the battle against COVID-19. Proof of Impact supported U4L in measuring and verifying the impact of their efforts: the delivery of meals, snack packs, and fast bars to hospital staff and nurses at their homes to keep their bodies and immune systems healthy so they can be at their best to help fight this disease.

For each meal, snack packs, and fast bar delivered, Proof of Impact independently verifies the deliveries through a series of supporting data points, such as timestamps, delivery locations, photos of the deliveries themselves, and shipment tracking identification numbers. Through this partnership, U4L is able to add confidence from a third party verifier that their measurable impact has been achieved, while at the same time creating a more engaging giving experience for their donors.

As such, we’re balancing developing solutions that address the short-term crisis alongside long-term issues – such as Sustainable Development Goals for social and environmental good – that we have the power to effect. It’s satisfying to be able to use the impact tracking for meals for frontline healthcare heroes, which will be an extension of the capabilities of our platform for tracking the impact of future programs.

Different, yet the same.

How are you planning to develop it further? What are the biggest obstacles you need to overcome? 

Impact investors have shown up in this new reality. As leaders in our space, we’re constantly asking ourselves how do we develop the necessary tools to help them deliver on their commitments to become more sustainable. It’s our primary goal to empower investors with the right metrics to measure the success of their investments. If they can more efficiently and confidently track their impact, then they can optimize how funds are deployed in order to do the most good. 

Looking towards the future, the work we’re doing now sets us up for data-driven investment products that will make it easier for investors to engrain impact into the financial products themselves. The challenge here is mostly around impact data collection – what to track, how to track, and how to measure – alongside educating investors around what is truly possible when you have real-time impact data. Imagine a world in which you have real-time impact data to drive decisions? 

The possibilities are endless – and tremendously powerful. 

Where do you see the biggest opportunities of blockchain and other technologies in relation to Covid-19? Where do you see risks?

At Proof of Impact, we use blockchain to keep a transparent and immutable record of data as “proof” that social or environmental good has been achieved.The transparency and confidence that blockchain technology instils is hard to beat. It’s powerful to know – with certainty – that impact occurred. The trust that secure data via the blockchain delivers affords the opportunity to create smart, automated investment structures – such as performance-based investments. 

As we collect more data around the benefits achieved in communities globally, it becomes increasingly important to take strong steps towards protecting personal privacy and data, because once it is minted on the blockchain, there is no return.

How can we best follow your work?

You can follow Kevin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevindeanpettit/ and Proof of Impact: www.proofofimpact.com.

Kevin, many thanks for your insights and inspirations, and for the great work you are doing!

Learn more about Proof of Impact’s selection of programs aiming to support communities particularly hard-hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. They range from providing recycled soap to at-risk communities around the world, supporting the U.S. restaurant and hospitality industry by funding their food provisions for under-represented communities during a lockdown, funding repair teams in Kenya to secure water systems in the drought-prone regions, to funding basic PPE and reliable sanitation products for families across South Africa.

Today, we talk to Karim Chabrak of Coinsence about his work in community building and decentralized value creation!

Karim is founder of coinsence.org, a decentral collaboration, value creation and exchange platform that enables communities to create their own impact currencies to fund SDG related projects and mobilize resources. Coinsence project is one of 6 global cohort projects which received funding from UNICEF Innovation fund and one of the first projects receiving ETH from UNICEF crypto fund that is supported by the Ethereum foundation.

Karim has an engineering and research background in telecommunication, is senior expert for network strategy and innovation and is delegate of Deutsche Telekom in 3GPP telecommunication standardization organization. Besides tokenized economy and fair finance, Karim’s main interest area is how to use technologies to create new economic and governance models which are better capable to tackle today’s social and environmental challenges.

Let’s start at the beginning – every changemaker needs to start somewhere. Do you have a specific story about what brought you on this path?

Already as a child, my mother started explaining me how the financial system works, and I started questioning the bugs and the long-term consequences. But I trusted at that time that the rules of the system are based on scientific facts and must make sense, and that governments will care about social and environmental aspects when problems become serious.

After the financial crisis in 2008, I started thinking about alternatives. For me, I could not find any logic justification why people still rely on a monetary system which is not transparent, which they do not control, and which is not mainly designed to consider local needs, personal interests (demands of individuals over those of corporates and institutions) and the long-term global challenges.

The Arabic revolution 2011 was the initiator for me to start thinking about alternative financial and governance systems. I could not understand that in the digital age educated youth keep wait over years to get jobs and to serve others interests instead of starting jointly creating value for themselves. I could not understand in a connected world that free humans still need to protest and fight against old structures while they are able to build complete new – even global – financial, governance and economic systems using the internet. I started looking for more peaceful and effective ways to empower people and enable political power shifts and economical transitions. Decentral organization tools, a better coupling between financial instruments and the collective intelligence of the people, and full transparency of monetary flows and value transactions seemed to be the right direction to think.

Luckily, I was not the only one believing that people can and have to create their own currencies (financial?) and governance systems, to enable change and to solve their own problems. Blockchain technology was around the corner and the tech ecosystem started innovating in all possible direction I could think about.

My firm believe in the potential of alternative currencies and economy came at a time I was analyzing corporate cultures and business operation models. looking for better solutions for effective innovation management, flexible and efficient cross-silo resource sharing and agile collaboration. At that time, it became obvious very fast that decentral governed open value creation ecosystem powered by different tokenized assets have the economic and social potential to bring about a real change.

You have an incredible wealth of experience to draw from. What were your favorite projects or initiatives to work on?

The favorite projects or initiatives to work on for me are generally those which create a positive impact on society and environment. Especially when working on big challenges with professional and inspiring people who really care, when working in a diverse and dynamic environment with reasonable autonomy, work gives life a sense and becomes a tremendous source of self-fulfillment and happiness.

My favorite project to work on is still Coinsence, where we face constantly new challenges. It gives me the opportunity to meet daily great people, discover new solutions and learn new things. Especially our work with UNICEF in Tunisia gives me a unique opportunity to meet great people in the civil society and from different institution, who really care about future generations and who are fully devoted to their mission.

We are currently focusing on setting up DAO’s (decentralized autonomous organization) to use the received ETH Crypto fund and mobilize the tech community to work on innovative solutions which contribute to positive impact on sustainable development goals SDG’s. Enabling people to propose ideas and decide about fund distribution requires careful design of the framework and a lot of advocacy and community building work to shift mindsets and ensure reaching positive results.

What are the most exciting things you are currently working on? 

Currently, I am working on adapting the Coinsence concept and solution to faster scale the community and increase the synergies and impact of the ecosystem. Besides community building and partner acquisition, I am working on the re-design of our technical solution, to meet at the same time the flexibility and security requirements we expect from a blockchain based solution and to offer on the other side our members simpler interfaces and a seamless user experience.

The most exciting thing is still the exchange with the great innovators and change makers within our network and the valuable and passionate discussions with people on our solution and its applications.

Based on your experience, what do you think are the 5 biggest roadblocks on the way to a more sustainable future?

I see that short terms thinking of decision makers, biased by personal, organizational and national interests, is the main roadblocks on the way to a more sustainable future. We have on one side national politics driven too often by people who do not understand global finance and economy and who are far from innovation and technology. Companies on the other side are still essentially measured by profit generation and shareholder value. Both act in a global ecosystem with multi-national corporates and a financial system with a high level of speculation.

The missing common vision, the lack of global democratic decision-making frameworks, and the lack of global monitoring and steering instruments force limit policy makers in creating global solutions, containing the exploitation of the environment, and create stable social systems with fair working conditions.

We have today many grassroots initiatives, social startups and growing movements in the society and within organization which are more and more aware of the problems and which are able to offer better solutions. The challenge is still how to mobilize resources, create synergies and manage transformation in a situation were still big decisions are made top-down in silos by people in the comfort zone who tend to do business as usual.

The power asymmetry between those who care about sustainability and society and those who benefit from fossil oil and financial speculation poses a big challenge for social entrepreneurs, innovators and change makers. Besides the big financial power to gamble and the excessive forces to control resource, the old establishments still have strong instruments to influence consumer behavior and public opinion. For me, it is always a challenge to find visionary leaders who invest the time to think out of the box beyond the current status quo, who understand alternative transformation strategies and who consider trying other ways and dare taking actions.

And it needs politicians who question the existing economic models which are measured based on growth of financial transactions (GDP). Wouldn’t it be great to hear a politician saying “we have to use technology to reduce workload and remove jobs to ensure that people get more time for social outreach and society as a social mesh can flourish.“. I believe this should be the right direction and that we can design the right cooperation models that support a sustainable growth of well-being. But it is not easy to talk with people about post growth economy, about reduction of production and consumption, or about cooperation efficiency and commons when their biggest fear is to lose their jobs and their homes.

Most today’s funding instruments are designed for extractive business models and for private equity creation. It is almost impossible for entrepreneurs to get funding for building transparent, sustainable and efficient prosumer ecosystems which are based on open value creation, decentral organization and distributed ownership.

Which role does technology, especially blockchain, play in this future? What role does it play along the way?

Distributed ledger technology combined with further sophisticated analytics and prediction algorithms could completely change global economy and the governance structures. Blockchain will enable people and communities to build completely new decision-making, resource management, value creation and exchange ecosystems. Blockchain offers new mechanisms to couple financial performance with the democratic will of people and with the social and environmental impact.

Sovereign and reliable digital identities will be the basis for a real change, on which any social, organizational or economic structure can be built. Connected devices and internet of things could deliver the needed data to build decentral value creation chain and ecosystems that can leverage common production tools and further create shared assets and resources.

Transaction fees and demurrage, flexible impact-based taxations can be implemented globally and bound to currency specific policies and governance frameworks.

Blockchain started already challenging different financial, economic and organizations models and enabling new form of cooperation between communities. The benefits of Blockchain related to giving people more control and enabling them to create value at lower cost is motivating more and more groups to experiment, iterate and scale. It’s just a matter of a few year, and we will start seeing a shift in society. Especially the mindset of the youth will change the more they become aware about their own potential and the powerful tools they have in their hands.

Considering current global Covid-19 challenge, do you see the potential added value of Blockchain?

Blockchain can be very helpful when suddenly, different stakeholders and individuals need to work together, must commit to certain deliverables and have to build trust without having an established organizational or legal framework. Smart contracts can help introducing reliable and flexible decentral processes to easily engage diverse organizations and individuals. Based on different social and business agreement, communities and organizations can create for example short-term liquidity to mobilize resources and fund projects addressing common challenges like Corona. We are currently introducing with partners in Tunisia an impact currency to fund innovative projects and community initiatives coming from different hackathons and associations. Here, companies can instead of donating money, also deliver resources now to projects or can offer in the future discounts to their customers who contributed to projects. The coins are used here to make projects, resources and transactions transparent and accountable. The engagement of each member in the network becomes visible and rewardable.

What is your advice for others that want to facilitate change in their community, industry, or in their life in general?

My clear advice for community and industry leaders is to learn more about technology and about alternative financial and economic models, to consider experimenting, introducing and using impact-oriented community currencies and become advocates for better solutions and a real change.

How can we best follow your work?

www.coinsence.org

https://www.facebook.com/coinsencetunisia/

de.linkedin.com › company › coinsencetn

All members, projects, activities and transactions are visible on our platform which can be joined under community.coinsence.org

Karim, thank you very much for this insightful and inspiring interview, and for your great work in the field!

Let’s start with Iulian Circo, the co-founder of Proof of Impact.

Iulian Circo is a recovering humanitarian turned entrepreneur. Over the last two decades he has been part of action-packed operations in some of the world’s most challenging environments that included humanitarian missions in post-conflict and peace-keeping settings such as Somalia or DR Congo. He has also run country operations for large global non-profits in places such as Swaziland or Mozambique. Over the last decade, he has founded and took to scale a number of impact-driven enterprises, including his current project, Proof of Impact – a venture-backed global marketplace for impact capital. Iulian is also involved with a number of other exciting ventures, either as co-founder, adviser, investor or board member.

Thank you so much for having this interview with us! To start off, a lot of your work is revolving around impact. How did you get to work on this topic? 

I have spent my whole life on the front-lines of impact delivery. From operationally-intense, hands-on work in post conflict settings all the way up to developing national and regional strategies for health service deliveries. Working on the frontlines of impact delivery I have learned to appreciate the role of technology as a force multiplier and the huge impact that entrepreneurship and innovation have on people and communities. I have also understood the inadequacy of incumbent business models (be these for profit or charity) in these settings and the huge opportunity that can be addressed with innovative business models that combine impact and profit. This is how I became a social entrepreneur and an impact start-up person.

Can you tell us a bit more about the things you are currently working on in this context? 

Well the most exciting venture I am involved in is Proof of Impact. Proof of Impact came to be out of the combination of my impact background and my co-founder’s insights from a life spent in capital markets and impact investing. We met in 2017 in Cape Town and both of us got excited by the idea of making impact tradeable. Of unlocking a trillion USD value of that we ended up calling the “Purpose Economy”. We see purpose as a transformational element that is defining the identity of a whole new generation. Young people are aware of the importance of social and environmental impact and see them as existential topics. They define their identity through purpose and authenticity, and this will change global economic frameworks fundamentally. 

We were initially self-funded and eventually we received some angel investment that helped us build a basic prototype and sign up a very exciting partnership with Cordaid and the Netherlands Government. Eventually we signed up more than 30 different partnerships with impact creators and our partnership pipeline is looking pretty good. We are now at an exciting point in our evolution as we have just closed our current round of funding – the first institutional funding round – and have received investments from a good mix of venture capital and more established asset managers across Silicon Valley and Crypto Valley. We are now looking at going to market properly and growing fast.  

What are the 5 biggest opportunities you see in impact measurement and investment? 

I have a contrarian opinion on impact measurement. I think the impact’s industry obsession with impact measurement as a stand-alone goal/ end in itself is problematic. The fact that there is a whole impact measurement industry that depends on impact measurement as a service is another problem. Impact should be obvious and at the heart of every decision taken. In that sense, I am looking forward to a situation where impact measurement is commoditized and standardized so that impact calculations are inherent in every business decision. You don’t have a “profit measurement” industry. Everyone in a company understands their profitability and the relationship of individual decisions to the profitability of the company. This is exactly how impact should work. 

In that sense, there is one big opportunity around building a utility infrastructure for measuring impact (positive and negative/ externalities). If indeed the wider economic framework is shifting towards a purpose-driven market, then every economic player – from small businesses to multinationals – will need to “prove” their impact to consumers and regulators. But if impact measurement remains as complex as it is now, most companies will not be able to verticalize impact measurements within their core business and would prefer to access (and pay for!) a utility service that would evaluate and calculate their actual impact. Plug an play.   

The other huge opportunity is that of building viable financial products for a new generation of investors. Investment products that are underwritten by impact. Not by impact narratives or theoretical models. But by real, verified events. This has been an elusive quest for decades (even both of founders of POI had various attempts at defining such models in the past). The emergence of blockchain technology provides a technical solution to some of the structural problems that come with this model. I think we can now use impact verification as a proof of work for a new type of financial asset and I am really enjoying the journey of POI leading on the market with this thinking. 

To complete the list of 5, in short order, a few other opportunities:

• Event-triggered models: where an event triggers a contract such as a payment. We’ll see applications in things like insurance and so on, but also in the context of the Internet of things and machines executing contracts with machines (think about cars paying for pollution or the use of certain streets etc). Another huge area of application is a new generation of performance based payments to fund impact on open marketplaces.  
• Eco-system payments. If things like the rain forest or the ocean have intrinsic value, then we could imagine whole monetary systems pegged to the state of the forest o the ocean and independent of any transient government. There are some very intelligent people thinking in this direction.
• Nano-payments applied to data. The BAT system and the Brave Browser are examples of this model applied to privacy. I believe there will be plenty other similar models in which people get instant nano-payments for specific data points. Huge applicability in health, too.

 What are the 5 biggest challenges? 

As always with innovation, the biggest challenge is inertia – people’s unwillingness to change something that they do not perceive as “broken”. This is particularly the case with incumbents, who have a lot to lose from the emergence of new models. However, once insurgent companies start rolling out these new models, the incumbents will struggle to keep up and many of them will not make it into the new framework. A few other challenges:

• Unreliable data around impact & a normalized cavalier attitude towards vague impact models;
• Fragmented impact frameworks, that make it very difficult to see the whole picture. This means that a company can have devastating negative externalities on the one side and some positive impact on the other without the two to be clearly reconciled;
• The fact that we tend to think about impact in isolation from everything else. The biggest shift in the larger economic framework will happen when the idea of “impact profitability” gets normalized – and it will happen under the pressure from the new generations of consumers.

Now, from a project perspective: How can projects effectively get started with a meaningful impact strategy? 

All projects should articulate a thesis of sorts about their impact on the world. And then work their way back from there. Also, it is a mistake to look at impact and understanding one’s impact as a hassle and a net cost. In the new competitive landscape impact – a proven impact, rather than an impact narrative – is a huge differentiator. Eventually it will become a passport factor where companies that do not prove their impact to the world will simply not be accepted by consumers, investors and regulators. 

What are your biggest lessons related to effective impact measurement? 

You got to keep things simple. Don’t try to track 70 different indicators. Have a clearly articulated thesis and track whatever correlates to that thesis. Also, know the difference between inputs and outputs –  try to only track outputs rather than inputs. 

Do you think social/ environmental impact and profit are mutually exclusive? Can they work together, and how? 

They are absolutely not mutually exclusive. In fact my core thesis as an entrepreneur is the exact opposite. I believe we are contemporary with a massive shift in the economic framework, led by a new generation of consumers that identify themselves with purpose and positive impact. These consumers will make profit at the cost of the environment socially unacceptable.  I believe that in this new economy, purpose is a minimum standard and companies that fail to prove a net positive impact will become obsolete as discerning, impact-minded consumers will simply refuse to engage with them. I believe that “purpose” for the new cohorts of consumers will be exactly what “social” was for millennials – everything will evolve around it. And we will see first-principles purpose companies that will shoot past mumbling incumbents who will struggle – and mostly fail – to keep up.

How can we best follow your work? 

Here are my personal twitter handle and Linkedin profile. I also write at Medium, occasionally.

Here is my company’s webpage. We are also active on instagram and on twitter.

Iulian, many thanks for your insights and inspirations, and for the great work you are doing!