Lessons Learned: How Our Venezuelan Recipients Used $57k in Phases 1 & 2 — and Where We Go from Here
For 80% of Venezuelans, stable access to food isn’t something they can count on.
In 2016, a kilogram of powdered milk — the fresh stuff is hard to come by — would run someone 7,000 bolívars fuertes on the black market, or about half a month of minimum wage. Today, that same amount costs 19,995 bolívars soberanos. It’s worth noting that by changing from the bolívar fuerte to the bolívar soberano, Venezuela removed five zeroes from the currency. If we compare the change in bolívars fuertes, the price rose from 7,000 bolivars to almost 2 billion bolivars.
Obscene prices and limited supplies are part of the reason only 8 percent of households reported eating protein each day. Because of this, acute malnutrition among children and adults continues to soar.
The people best qualified to heal the pains of a community are those living within it, not ivory-tower philanthropists from first world countries.
We knew this going into our pilot program earlier this year. It’s why we decided to distribute funds directly to those in need, rather than buying what we believe they need most and gifting it to them.
During phases one and two of our Venezuela Ambassador Program, we worked with 38 ambassadors to give crypto to about 1,000 people.
Some quick facts about our recipients and survey respondents:
- 90% of the recipients we surveyed earn between $0 and $20 per month.
- Their average age is 40 years old.
- 55% of the recipients are female.
- 87% of our recipients are single.
The ambassador model connects crypto funds directly to recipients through a network of trusted ambassadors. These ambassadors are community members, friends, and neighbors. They helped the recipients understand how crypto works and distributed more than $57,000 so far. Recipients and ambassadors receive $10 per week, for six weeks.
When we launched phase one of our pilot program back in April, we knew that most of the money we gave out would go toward things recipients struggled to afford. This included food, medical care, and basic supplies. Phase one focused on launching an early version of our program as quickly as possible, and learning along the way.
In phase two, we focused on improvement. We honed in on our distribution model, launched a mobile platform that was compatible with the older phones, and better defined our KPIs.
As we begin phase three of our pilot program, we’re constantly learning from the data we’ve gathered so far. We’re determined to turn our grassroots lessons into a plan to scale GiveCrypto beyond our initial communities.
What success means for our pilot program — and how we’re measuring it
Over the last year, GiveCrypto has been experimenting with different ways to help those in need. We’ve developed a framework to help us measure our progress and find areas of improvement.
We also worked closely with IDinsight, a company that partners with global nonprofits to find ways to use data to understand and combat poverty. They helped us identify which metrics are most relevant to our project.
We tracked our impact using self-reported surveys before and after each phase. On those surveys, we asked questions related to the following metrics:
- Number of skipped or reduced meals in the last 30 days
- Number of days without eating food in the last 30 days
- Stress about access to medicine and healthcare
- Stress about illness
- Stress about food affordability
- Stress about education access for children
We looked at data from the Ethereum blockchain to better understand our participants. To do this, we analyzed the following information:
- Known address of participants
- Transfer numbers and destinations
- Transaction sizes and how long funds were held
Finally, we used a combination of on-chain data and manual back checks by contractors in Venezuela to detect fraud attempts and prevent misuse of funds.
[Note: Due to the technological and logistical obstacles we ran into in phase one, this article primarily focuses on phase-two impact data.]
Where $17k of crypto went during phase one
At GiveCrypto, we’re focused on helping people in need and we believe directly distributing crypto is the best way to do this in a place like Venezuela. But this method comes with challenges: People need to learn a new technology and economic philosophy in a country whose market is anything but stable. Truthfully, we’re learning right along with them most of the time.
Unfortunately, due to our limited post-survey participation and technological difficulties related to our mobile platform, it’s hard to nail down how much impact crypto had on recipients.
How our recipients used their crypto funds in phase one
In terms of how the funds were spent and the destination of transfers, we saw the following breakdown:
- 91.1% (about $15,487) of funds were sent to vendors.
- 5.5% (about $935) of funds were sent to unknown addresses.
- 3.5% (about $595) of funds were exchanged between recipients.
This data is about what we’d expect. People are most likely to use crypto immediately and to buy goods and services they otherwise couldn’t afford.
Few of our recipients have saved or held onto the funds beyond two days of receiving them. This makes sense, as many recipients are struggling to make ends meet, not save for future needs.
Where funds were most effective in phase one
From the beginning, we anticipated that food security would be one of the areas crypto could most help with. While we had limited data available at the end of our first phase, we did see a 23.5% reduction in the number of people who had gone a day without food during phase one.
A staggering 91.5% of our phase one recipients said they had cut the size of or skipped meals in the last 30 days before our program. At the end of phase one, only 33.6% felt they had to do so to make ends meet.
We also saw a small decrease in worry and anxiety about access to education and medical care, but the numbers were too small to be significant.
How phase-two data drives us to improve and change
We started phase two by resolving some of the technological and logistical issues we encountered in phase one.
As mentioned above, we had trouble post survey responses at the end of phase one. A big reason for this was that our recipients and ambassadors were running into issues using our mobile web app, as most phones in Venezuela run older browsers that our platform wasn’t optimized for.
We realized we had to offer a platform that was compatible with older devices to make information gathering easier.
This change made it easier for people to have funds deposited into their wallets. In turn, this streamlined the use and transfer of funds among recipients and vendors, while also making our purchase verification process smoother. With fewer bugs in the system, our recipients could focus on learning where crypto could be used.
Thanks to these changes, we were able to see a statistically significant reduction in:
- People skipping meals.
- People going a full day without eating.
- People worried about having enough money for food.
- People worried about health problems.
We also saw a less significant, but still positive, change in how stressed people were about education access and healthcare affordability.
Helping people get the food they need
After phase one, we were expecting to see the number of people skipping meals to continue to drop as we distributed more crypto. Our phase-two results were about what we expected, and again showed us that a few extra dollars per week would mean a family member doesn’t have to go hungry as often.
Phase-two data saw a 10 percentage point reduction in people skipping meals and a 16 percentage point reduction in those going a full day without eating. Both of these results are statistically significant at p=0.01, meaning that there’s a less than 1% likelihood that this happened by chance.
How crypto donations affected the psychological well-being of recipients
During phase two, we saw decreases in every category measuring psychological stressors. This included:
- Less worrying over having enough money for food (9 percentage points)
- Less worrying over health problems (15 percentage points)
- Less worrying over children not being able to attend school (1 percentage point)
- Less worrying over access to affordable healthcare (7 percentage points)
It’s exciting to see statistically significant changes in stress around food affordability and health problems. Of course, extra money makes it easier to afford food for your family, but it also helps people feel like they would be OK if they got sick and needed care.
While people reported feeling less stressed about education and healthcare access after phase two, it wasn’t significant enough to link directly to our program.
Overall, we’re very excited by these results. Reducing daily stressors means that families can focus on the things that matter to them beyond survival.
Where we go from here
Like our previous experiments, our first two phases were full of learning opportunities for us. While we saw that crypto had a real impact in helping people get the food they need, there are a number of changes to implement in phase three to prevent fraud, measure impact, and better work with ambassadors and recipients.
Also, it’s unlikely we’ll ever fully prevent fraudulent attempts to game the distribution of crypto. Yet, we’ll continue to invest in real-time blockchain analysis, robust back-checks by ambassadors, and require recipients to upload receipts to verify their purchases.
If you aren’t doing so already, please follow our journey on Twitter for progress updates.
