“We hope to bring more transparency to charity and blockchain technology’s decentralized nature fits that purpose well. It means that all the information and transaction history of funds will be more reliable and can’t be easily tampered with.” Ant Financial CTO Cheng Li

One of the most compelling examples of this phenomenon is the Colombian cacao sector. There are approximately 38,000 cacao farmers in Colombia, and of these farmers 90% are smallholders and 73% live below the poverty line. This is mainly due to a lack of access to markets and fair prices, investment, capacity building, insurance, technology and an inadequate governance and policy framework.

In addition, artificially depressed prices for premium “fino de aroma” cacao put producers under pressure to revert to the production of cocaine in order to survive. Strong demand for cocaine bolsters the illegal armed groups which destabilize Latin American societies by undermining the authority of governments and the rule of law, and eroding transparency and the trust of citizens.

Following the 2016 peace agreement that ended a war lasting over 50 years with the FARC (Colombia’s largest guerrilla group), the Colombian government has identified over 100,000 hectares of coca plantations in post-conflict regions. To date, 77,000 families have voluntarily agreed to remove their coca plants. However, participation of the private sector is crucial to mobilize capital and provide the education and tools necessary for a farmer’s success in sustainably replacing their coca crop without suffering financial ruin.

Starting in Colombia, Choco4Peace is focused on empowering smallholders, particularly women, youth and indigenous people willing to transition from the production of cocaine to the cultivation of specialty “fino de aroma” cacao. This is accomplished by using smart-contract Blockchain technology to create a Decentralized Inclusive Economic Network (DIEN). This network aggregates cacao producers with stakeholders from the cacao industry, giving cacao entrepreneurs access to markets and fair prices, investment, capacity building, insurance, technology. Within this platform, the presence of transparency and traceability mitigates risk, mobilizes investments, and builds trust among members.

By promoting the growth of cacao, Choco4Peace not only diminishes the production of cocaine, but works toward solving the critical cacao supply deficit of 1 million tons per year (by 2020) while striving to meet six of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) from the United Nations.

It even reverses the traditional insurance model for natural disasters, thanks to a service powered by blockchain that offers a fast, fair and transparent refund and empowers users to customize their premium, allowing also microinsurance.

Helperbit has been selected for the BlockChainSpace accelerator program, and has been featured on Nasdaq, Techcrunch, il Sole 24 Ore, Wired Italia and many more.Helperbit won the startup competition at the D10e conference in Amsterdam, the community prize at the GTEC competition in Berlin, the second prize at the Blockchain Startup Contest in Graz, the second prize at the ABI competition in Milan and was selected in the top 100 innovation projects at the World Humanitarian Summit, which was sponsored by the United Nations.

With this conditions, Sri Lanka is a perfect candidate to feel the benefits of decentralized, collaborative and automated insurance, especially in the farming sector, where hundreds of thousands of small producers are increasingly exposed to climate change risks.

The partnership, announced at the “Blockchain for Social Good” event in London by Etheric’s Inclusive Insurance leader Michiel Berende, is an example of multidisciplinary cooperation to address complex real-world problems. Oxfam provides the first-hand experience in the farmer-community, Aon lends its knowledge in the (re)insurance market and in developing insurance propositions, while Etherisc brings its blockchain and decentralized risk-pools expertise.

The project background is also an interesting case of how blockchain can be used to improve current processes and avoid having to start building solutions from scratch. We believe the disruption is in the results, not in the players, the tech or the process.

In this case, blockchain has a great potential for enabling insurance for smallholder farmers, a largely untapped niche because of its great challenges, from accessing remotes farmers areas with no banking access to deal with costly red tape and liquidity constraints.

Oxfam has been successfully working with the private sector on agricultural weather index insurance in Sri Lanka for farming communities at risk of losing crops due to extreme weather. The project with Etherisc and Aon aims to build on the current system with a blockchain-based process workflow to create efficiencies, develop trust across the value chain and deliver a scalable platform to support a larger insured base.

Using a weather data index as a trigger for smart contracts, we can automate a lot of cumbersome tasks in the laborious insurance claim process, making the compensation process more effective and affordable. This is especially relevant when working with insurance for smallholder farmers, as sometimes the cost of processing a claim can sometimes surpass the claimed amount.