When you donate money to a charity or NGO, do you get to see precisely where and how your funds were spent and the outcomes of that spending? Probably not. Your best hope is for a couple pie charts.
This isn’t just because some organizations might not feel that granular impact assessment is necessary, it’s also because conducting impact assessment is often an afterthought, which makes doing it more cost-heavy, labor-intensive, and generally difficult. Yet when done correctly, high-quality impact information about a group’s project can have a powerful iterative effect, making not just that specific organization far more effective over time, but also multiplying the effectiveness of countless other organizations with similar missions around the world.
Part of the impact assessment process is data collection. But that brings up a host of issues, especially when it comes to vulnerable populations. What happens if the organization providing services for refugees or the homeless are unscrupulous, and choose to sell that data to anyone who is willing to pay? What happens if your database gets hacked and that crucial, identifying data gets stolen?These are problems that the founders of Amply and ixo — organizations focused on impact assessment in early childhood development centers in South Africa — have thought a lot about.
“There’s this notion that as long as you’re giving, it’s good. But there’s no next step… Having a blockchain-based system to track these projects and track the funding gives you accountability and transparency.”
I spoke with Amply’s project lead, Joyce Zhang (also the program manager at ixo) about how the Amply is integrating blockchain into its operations to positively influence the lives of schoolteachers, students, program administrators, and even South African government workers. Zhang was volunteering at a refugee camp in South Africa when she first learned of Amply. Amply is a decade-old organization that precedes the current blockchain hype and boom, and already has a smartphone app that’s being used by teachers in South Africa.
Zhang also explains how the ixo platform could transform the way impact data is collected and communicated. The various tokens on the ixo platform can be called cryptocurrencies in a loose sense, but they’re completely different from the ones you’re likely to have heard of. Is it accurate to consider these tokens as money? See what you think after reading this.
Aaron Fernando, Shareable: Can you tell me a little bit about how ixo and Amply started?
Joyce Zhang, Project Lead at Amply: A decade ago, our founder Shaun Conway, who spent his entire career in medicine had this idea of a collaborative aid marketplace. So, not just being in these silos of development or limited to countries or limited to organizations, but really having a global marketplace for this: where data can be shared and should be accessible to improve health outcomes and just outcomes in general. Around 2014, he and our other co-founder Lohan met and got together and wanted to pilot a project. Basically there was an opportunity to receive some money if it was in ECD (which is early childhood development) here in South Africa.
So that’s how Amply started — as an idea or as a project. They created a mobile app that would track the attendances of students or children in ECD centers in South Africa. The teachers would use this mobile app and all their attendances would be ledgered to a blockchain and that would help with the subsidying process in South Africa. So I think per child, per attendance, you get 15 rand, which is about one US dollar. So that was Amply.
In 2016 they received the UNICEF Innovations Fund investment as a first [use of blockchain investment], and from there, they were able to pilot that project in November 2016 and brought it into centers around South Africa.
So how that relates to ixo, is that within this project they found this model of basically tracking impact and being able to ledger that onto a blockchain — and then, hopefully, receive funding and tokenize the impact. Creating a blockchain for impact where anyone can set up a project, where you set up the parameters, you have a blockchain-based system to ensure transparency and accountability as well as create this local impact ledger, and the funding flows through in a tokenized model.
Can you explain, very simply, what exactly is the advantage of tokenizing impact data on the blockchain?
The reason blockchain has a few advantages — the first one, as with the blockchain ledger, is bringing transparency and accountability into the impact space, which I think is greatly missing. As you can imagine, with charity and giving and donations, there’s this notion that as long as you’re giving, it’s good. But there’s no next step. Is this money actually going to where you think it’s going? How much of it is going there? So having a blockchain-based system to track these projects and track the funding gives you accountability and transparency there.
On a larger scale, to have this global data commons of impact data, I think, will ultimately be the future. We kind of live in an age where everything kind of stems from data and what we can do with data. Impact data is also super relevant and important. To be honest, there are projects happening in literally every single country, in every community, and they probably share a lot of similarities that we just aren’t picking up on right now and there’s no way to track that. I think blockchain creates the best mechanism for that tracking and also making it public — not just in the silos of government and big organizations.
And is one of the ideas and advantages that you could sort of remove sensitive information that might be relevant to a vulnerable population so that it can be shared more freely?
Yeah, I think there are a few aspects of the data piece. One of the things that’s great about what we’re doing is that people — whether it’s you as an individual or a group of people or a vulnerable population — as long as you are the owners of your project or you set up a project, you actually own your data. So you’ll never be at the whim of … I don’t want to name any names, but just any big organization who is helping this community and they actually own all of your data and can use it for research and can sell it to whoever else. So for vulnerable populations, I think that’s there.
Also when you bring in data science and eventually AI and machine learning aspects of it, maybe you can be able to spot these trends and see what’s been working and what’s also working to ultimately help vulnerable populations wherever they are.
One thing that was interesting but also a little unclear was the fact that you can trade impact tokens and you can give those to the people who invest. Can you explain what the advantage of that is, and maybe give an example of when that would be advantageous?
So an impact token vs an IXO token?
Actually, you can talk about both, because that would be useful.
So an IXO token is an ERC-20 token. So you, or whoever else would use IXO tokens to stake a project and participate in the network. So to be in the system, you use your IXO token.
Within the ixo network, though. Imagine, let’s say we have five projects. We’ll use Amply for this for a simple example, since Amply will be one of the projects. If I want to set up Amply, I would pay some network fees to the servers in the IXO token. Within Amply, at the end when my attendances are verified, I would receive a… let’s call it an Amply token.
What we’re hoping for Amply, is that eventually the government of South Africa will buy into our system and instead of teachers having to take this paper form of all of the attendances that they’ve taken every month, they can just transfer that token to the government, and then the government will transfer funding to them. So it just digitizes that process. The token, as you know, is not a literal coin or anything, it just represents some token of impact.
In a larger system, what we hope will happen when trading them (this is kind of the medium-to-long-term-goal) is to start creating categories of impact.
Right now, Amply is a very small and closed off and it’s just the 15 rand in the Western Cape Government, so that’s a relatively closed-off system. But eventually maybe you can create some sort of parameters or guidelines for an education token.
So then education in South Africa can somehow be valued or comparable to education being delivered in the US. That education token can then have some correlation to a carbon token — so kind of like how carbon credits now have quite a developed marketplace around them, with people trading, buying and selling credits. So then maybe you can have a carbon token. And then a water token. You can just imagine the things that can blossom out of this once you start collecting all this data and then semi-standardizing and categorizing it.
I came across a quote in your whitepaper that made it seem like you’re going to automate some of the collection and impact assessment, is that the case?
Yeah, that is the goal. I think our founders’ long-term goal is that it will all be automated. If we collect enough data now, and then slowly teach AI to automate it. We hope — the proprietary aspect of every project is actually accompanied in that evaluation step. Whoever sets up the project, that evaluation step will determine kind of how your project goes [based on] how it’s going to be evaluated.
My last question about ixo is: where does ixo get its name? What does it mean?
It actually doesn’t stand for anything. It’s a play on the words “impact”, “exchange” and “optimization.” Those are the three things we want to get across. Impact and exchange, like the system we’re creating and then eventually, once you create those things, to optimize the delivery.
All right! Moving on to Amply, can you give an overview of what you’re doing, the location, demographics, and what problem you’re solving exactly?
Amply started — got into the market and into the field as of November 2016. We ran our first pilot from November 2016 until November 2017 and that was using the initial grant from UNICEF Innovation, as well as a local investment fund here called Innovation Edge. They’re kind of the biggest players in ECD here in South Africa. So with that money, we rolled out into different schools and centers, much with the help of Innovation Edge. We’re mostly in the Western Cape but there are a few centers around the Johannesburg area, as well as in [other areas] North of Durban. We haven’t yet expanded outside of South Africa, although that is kind of a plan to eventually go out of South Africa.
“A lot of tech companies, especially in the development space…present a solution and hope it works.
Whereas we are walking hand-in-hand with the community to try to create the best solution possible.”
So right now, we are in a more closed-off phase of project testing in a community here in the Western Cape. It’s about thirty minutes from Cape Town. And there, we’re working with seven centers right now to do a lot of testing and design and functional changes — and just including them in the design and making sure process and the building process.
That’s a big aspect that a lot of tech companies, especially in the development space, kind of miss, is including this perspective. A lot of them just present a solution, hope it works, and then do rounds of edits. Whereas we are walking hand-in-hand with the community to try to create the best solution possible.
So what we want to do — our first goal — here in South Africa, you get a 15 rand subsidy per child per day for attendances for qualified children. That’s all paper-based right now. Through this app, we can digitize that process, which will save both the centers as well as the government time and money by just doing it. Secondly for the government, and for the centers, we’ll start creating a database of what children exist. Currently that’s a huge issue here in South Africa. They don’t even know how many children are in these townships and what the need is, so then they can’t accurately budget for it and have provisioning for that.
Then the longer term goal, also here is that each child and staff member gets a decentralized identity (a DID) and that identity, we hope, will eventually build up to become kind of self-sovereign identity or another identity mechanism.
From what it seemed online, it tracks the child but it’s not identifiable necessarily?
Right now, to be perfectly honest, the identity piece is just happening on the back-end. We don’t involve the child or the teacher in that aspect.
You can imagine: you give them an app and then you try to tell them, “Oh, and by the way, you have this unique number that’s connected to you when you use it.” So we haven’t developed that out yet. Theoretically, every student and staff member in the system does have a unique identifier number. So every time they run a transaction, that number is associated with the transaction.
How does that work? Do they have to type it in to login to the app?
No, we make it very user friendly. Every staff member — they’re the ones taking attendance right now — it’s just their phone number and pin. But then when we create their profiles, the system will automatically create a unique decentralized identifier for them. So when they login and take attendance, their identifier is associated with each attendance they’ve taken.
When you talk about the subsidies for each child, is that kind of like the teacher’s pay?
No… I’m sure a lot of the money does go to the teacher’s pay, but it’s just a subsidy that goes to the center that they can then use for teachers pay, schools, etc.
When I studied international development, one of the things that came up in a study was that — since corruption is kind of everywhere — and when you track something, you actually can reduce the rates of corruption by simply communicating that something is being tracked. Is that also of a goal of this?
Maybe it’s possible that schools or teachers are over-reporting so that they get a bigger subsidy. Is this kind of one of the problems you’re solving?
Exactly, that’s a big issue here: over-reporting, missing children, some teachers will kind of change the front first name and last name, change a digit of the ID number — all sorts of stuff like that. I think the government here, doesn’t even have an Excel database that they have. They just have papers and then at the end of the month, they spread all the papers out and try to match children — try to match ID numbers.
This is definitely like three steps past that. Ideally, the end and final goal that we have is that the students… right now we have the teachers taking the attendances and claiming those student attendances. But the end goal would be to have the students claim their own attendances. That would happen probably [with] biometrics, but the technology, but right now the technology, at least for children — especially for black children in South Africa — facial recognition and fingerprint recognition is just not that good yet.
That’s related to a question I wanted to ask — since you’re dealing with highly vulnerable populations, what do you do to ensure that you’re making sure that one, their data is safe; but also two, that you’re not kind of like stepping in as an outsider that’s like, “Look at our solution!” and making them feel like they have to use it?
With our project right now, we try to do that. We want to involve that in the development process and I think it’s quite empowering thing to have them look at different, like A/B testing, have them provide their input. We go on-site quite often. We want to ask them, “Are we confined to the things you have to do? Are we making this as easy a process for you as possible? Is there anything we can change? What else would you like to see?” I think that’s a part of it.
I think the other part of it is — and I think this is kind of an issue in the blockchain space — there’s a kind of aura that’s very anti-government and anti-establishment, anti-corporation. But I think we can’t go into it like that because these especially vulnerable populations, they rely heavily on the government and heavily on these big organizations. So we’re not going into it being like, “Use this instead of the government” or “Use this because the government is failing you,” but we want to just facilitate the processes that are already in place.
I should also mention that we’re hoping with Amply that it’s also going to get redone onto ixo. So it’ll be the first project running on ixo, so then, eventually outside funding can then stream into Amply.
So you can decide, “This is a really cool project, I want to donate $100,” or whatever. And then for those attendances, instead of the teachers getting it from the government, they can get it from private funders or whoever else is using this system. So that’ll happen but we don’t want to come in and say to completely disregard the government. We actually work quite closely with the government.
And both Amply — the way you made it sound — Amply is not currently on ixo, but they’ll both be on the Ethereum blockchain?
Ixo isn’t ready yet, so ixo isn’t ready to have any project yet. But when Amply ran its pilot — it’s last pilot — that was on Ethereum. That was not sustainable for a lot of reasons. But it was done on Ethereum. Once ixo is ready (probably in a few months) it’ll be the first project put onto the ixo blockchain.
So it’s not on Ethereum, yet the token is? Once it is operational, will it be using the Ethereum blockchain itself or it’ll just have a token on the Ethereum blockchain?
Yeah, so it’ll just have the IXO token there [on the Ethereum blockchain] but the actual data and claims will all lay on ixo.
This was originally published as a Q&A on Shareable with a creative commons license and is reprinted with permission. Since Shareable readers and Medium readers constitute different audiences, I will be posting the full-length interviews for anyone who wants more information, including the slightly more technical questions I may ask.
All photos courtesy of ixo and Amply. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
