Blockchain Technology Meets the Development Sector
The success of Charity Stars’ AidCoin ICO — raising its over $14 million hard cap in a mere 90 minutes — shone a light on the deployment of distributed ledger technology in the development sector. While it may have the profile other projects lack, it certainly isn’t the only example of blockchain companies active in development. Let’s take a look at a few.
AidCoin Leads the Donation Race
AidCoin was a heavily backed project that developed an ERC-20 cryptocurrency, with a ticker AID, that allows people to donate to charities and track their donation on the AIDChain blockchain.
AIDCoin was not the first example of the sector’s use of cryptocurrency to attract donations from the public. UNICEF Australia created a website that used visitors’ CPU power to mine Monero (XMR), which would be donated to the organisation. Mine For Charity and Charity Mine ran on the same principles: instead of handing over cash, the public would be able to donate CPU power.
The United Nations Begins Embracing Blockchain Technology
UNICEF invested over $11 million in blockchain startup projects through its innovation venture fund. Some of those projects were incubated internally. The organisation partnered with Prescrypto to deliver and track prescription medicines. The supply chain was monitored and controlled using distributed ledger technology.
Supply chain management is, of course, no stranger to the deployment of the nascent technology. Logistics is possibly the most advanced industry to embrace and deploy blockchains, usually relying on Hyperledger Fabric or the IOTA Foundation.
But the development sector, which distributes millions of vaccinations in challenging environments annually, appears ripe for DLT deployment. Furthermore, a 2016 study, reported by The Guardian, found that “trust and confidence in charities has fallen to the lowest recorded level since monitoring began in 2005 — from 67% to 57%. This is a wake-up call for everyone who supports charity work…”
It is exactly that — trust and confidence — which Havuta hopes to restore to the sector.
Havuta and Impact Evaluation
Impact evaluation is critical to a nonprofit organisation proving the effectiveness of its programs. With industry norms requiring NGOs to spend between five and eight percent of their budgets on evaluating their impact, it is clear that donors take seriously the organisations they fund achieving their goals and reporting their impact.
Havuta combines surging smartphone penetration in the developing world with the veracity of the blockchain to help NGOs measure their impact by sending surveys directly to their beneficiaries, eliminating middlemen and giving NGOs enhanced and provable access to feedback from the communities they serve.
While supply chain, logistics, cryptocurrency donations, and micropayment apps have been the frontrunning beneficiaries of blockchain technology in the sector, Havuta’s data collecting app signals a shift toward renewed interest in helping NGOs restore trust and confidence in the general public and their donors.
Trust and confidence are key benefits of distributed ledger technology, and Havuta aims to bring those benefits to NGOs in the field.
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