Fifteen years ago today, an attack on the United Nations (UN) in Baghdad during the course of the Iraq War, Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the head of the United Nations in Iraq and twenty-one of his colleagues were killed by al-Qaeda.
That tragedy marked World Humanitarian Day (WHD) to pay tribute to the over 4,000 aid workers, to date, who have been killed, injured, detained or kidnapped while delivering humanitarian service to the people affected by crises around the world.
On this WHD, the UN raises awareness to the millions of civilians in cities and towns affected by armed conflict with daily struggles for food, water, and safe shelter, while fighting drives them from their homes. Children are used as human shields, and their schools are destroyed. Women are abused, raped and humiliated. Men are removed from their families only to be summarily executed and buried in mass graves.
Humanitarian workers and medical workers are prevented from bringing relief and care to those in desperate need, and are targeted as threats as they desperately try their best to deliver aid, and treat the wounded and the sick. Everyone in the conflict including children, women, people with disabilities, the elderly, migrants, and journalists, need to be protected. Conflict is forcing record numbers of people from all around the world from their homes in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Syria, Somalia and Yemen.
These refugees which number over 65 million, leave their homes, communities, and countries with little more than the shirts on their backs, as they shuttle from country to country until they reach a country that is willing to offer them a new home, a new life, and a new beginning. Blockchain may reduce the struggles of these refugees in three main areas: digital identities, humanitarian aid, and financial inclusion.
His Excellency Dato’ Mahdi Rahman, Brunei Darussalam Ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Switzerland marks this day of remembrance with:
War and conflict around the world are destroying the fragile fabric of our communities, and technology such as blockchain can play critical roles in protecting refugees in addition to the workers that deliver humanitarian aid to places where their lives are most at risk.
When refugees escape the armed conflict in their countries, they are often without any documentary evidence of their identities such as passport, driver’s license or national identity cards. Refugees may begin by establishing their identities on the blockchain with inherent factors such as their fingerprint, face, voice, or iris. These biometric methods can be securely saved on the blockchain and the refugees properly identified to receive the correct aid.
The dissemination of humanitarian aid is a supply chain and logistics nightmare with war-torn infrastructure as the aid traverses from warehouse to warehouse to distribution centers to planes, ships, and trucks via air, sea, and land, and ultimately to the correct recipient of the aid. The dissemination of humanitarian aid has two inherent problems.
Firstly, each step of the logistics whether it is storage or transportation has a potential leakage problem. Secondly, the delivery of aid to the correct recipient is a challenge when the identities of the refugees cannot be confirmed. Supply chain and logistics is one of the classic use cases for blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT). The immutable recording of the movement of goods from one point to the other and the confirmation of the quality and quantity of the goods by both the sender and receiver in each logistic step reduces the leakages of aid to zero. Conversely, the storage of the identities of refugees on blockchain based on biometrics as described above ensures the correct matching of humanitarian aid to recipients.
As refugees rebuild their homes in the new countries that receive them, they also rebuild their finances. Financial inclusion for the unbanked and underbanked plays a key role in this rebuilding. Digital wallets, digital money, digital transactions on the blockchain serve as an onramp to the freeway of traditional financial services and products as these refugees settle into their new lives and homes.
Chynge salutes the humanitarian aid workers who risk their lives every day to make the world a better place for refugees and Chynge believes that financial technology (FinTech) can play a large role in the digital identities, dissemination of aid, and financial inclusion of refugees in the unfortunate displacement of their normal lives in armed conflicts across the world.
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