Part 1: How technology is destined to radically transform charity
In the summer of ’17 I travelled through Colombia, parts of Panama (mostly the islands in front of the coast) and Peru. Anne, my ex girlfriend, joined me after I had been backpacking through Colombia on my own for two weeks. Together we visited some of the beaches adjacent to the Caribbean Sea and the city of Cartagena, then moved west to visit the San Blas islands neighbouring the coast of Panama. A small island state, home to indigenous people and offered to them after they had been chased away from the mainland of Panama. Sadly, these islands are rapidly disappearing. When we arrived, we were welcomed to stay with the locals, experience their culture, eat their food and sleep at their places.
I think it was our second day there when we visited a smaller, but absolutely stunning island. No one actually lived there. We were with a group of people and I started talking with this guy who had been travelling the world for over three years. Coming from Germany originally, he had this kinda weird hobby making middle age swords. He basically was a blacksmith living in the 21st century. He was quite a character. The point is that he had been travelling near Nepal, back in 2015, when a major earthquake had hit. So, he decided to go see if he could be of any assistance. Once he got there, he joined a group of backpackers to see the effects of the earthquake first hand, and investigate how they could be of help.
What they encountered left them shocked: a country shattered and turned to complete ruins, while big NGOs such as the Red Cross would fly in Boeing 747s with lawyers, accountants and the whole shebang of Western ‘double-left-handed-help’. Unprepared to temporarily do away with the luxury they were accustomed to, staying in 5-star hotels and only getting out for a limited amount of hours per day. So, this German guy and the group of backpackers started working together with locals to come up with a suitable approach to offer the necessary help. After a few days of indicating the effects and having a general idea of what was needed, they started helping in their own way: by closely cooperating with locals instead of forcing a foreign, bombastic approach with little or even damaging results.
As luck would have it, one of the backpackers was an architect and another had been working in construction for years. They ended up being this wonderful, mixed group of people from all over the world, with different backgrounds and expertise; bundled together with local knowledge. In this composition, they were able to build over 200 houses in a period of only three weeks. Sustainable, and in a very cost-effective way by constantly communicating and working together with locals. They discovered that uniting the right efforts can create a new sort of organism; so that humanity can become more than the sum of its cultures.
The effort of NGOs to build only a fraction of the residences that had been built by the mixed group of backpackers, sometimes will take up over two months. For a fraction of the price, these backpackers pulled it off to create housing that is more sustainable, and better adjusted to local conditions, than most NGOs could ever have created. NGOs normally ‘plant’ format housing that only lasts approximately two years, while the houses of the joint effort of the locals and backpackers were built following local conditions and requirements, effectively combining Western expertise with local knowledge of material and contextual and cultural conditions.
That was the moment it hit me. If all this can be accomplished by a group of backpackers and locals through passionate cooperation based on personal skillsets and the availability of resources, how much more effective would humanitarian aid be if there was a transparent platform facilitating just this: p2p charity in a combined effort of locals and travellers who are willing to cooporate in order to help humanity.
Personally, I’m a strong believer in the inevitability of technology, hence my deep appreciation and passion for blockchain technology: guaranteeing full transparency and accuracy of the gift, while taking away the unnecessary friction (middleman). Keeping the sole purpose of charity alive while deinstitutionalizing the industry and taking away superfluous noise.
So, I started making rounds on that beautiful 100x50m big island, my brain on fire, making notes while rapidly working out a framework in which blockchain would fit as a means of making charity not only locally available and much more effective, but also efficient and fully transparent by tracking microfunding and making Western resources available to projects in different parts of the world on the smallest of scales.
To be continued..
