“Mambo Digital”— Introducing Digital Cash to Maasai communities
Emerging Impact assists a team of local and international NGOs to pilot the use of digital cash across 4 communities in Kenya’s Laikipia County. The pilot is funded by Celo as part of the broader partnership with EI to promote and drive the adoption of blockchain-enabled digital cash delivery in the aid sector.
Digital Cash for Work
This digital cash for work initiative is a solution that Emerging Impact has worked to embed within an existing long-term program focused on climate-resilient solutions to strengthen small-holder farming communities (CRESS), such as the Maasai, who have become a vulnerable minority impacted by climate change. The program is centered around the construction of sand dams, which are the catalyst for soil regeneration, farming, and new business practices for the women-led Maasai community groups. Rather than volunteering, the program participants will now be paid for the work they do — enabling their efforts to stretch further and improve livelihoods within households, in addition to preserving the environment.
The pilot is accelerating the process of accounting for and delivering payouts by leveraging the ultra-fast and cost-effective Celo blockchain and KotaniPay USSD-wallets, allowing pilot participants to access their wages immediately, and cash out instantly to mPesa (a mobile money operator) using basic feature phones.
Donor to Recipient Direct Transfers
The program, where the pilot is embedded, has multiple partners and shows the complexities of the aid supply and value chain. In this particular case, we have a donor, an international NGO, the local implementing partner (coordinating the sand dams construction), and their community partner organization that works with the communities on the ground. The last, and fifth stakeholders, are the women representing the community itself, who are receiving the cash payments for the work they complete. In this context, digitizing the cash for work process with blockchain and digital currency acts as a coordinating mechanism that shortens the funds flow supply chain, lowering costs and decreasing the time of delivering aid to end recipients.
What’s more — the pilot design goes a step further and tests donor-to-recipient direct disbursements, which are generated and authorized by the NGOs through the use of smart contracts on a disbursement dashboard (see flow chart below).
In other words, the funds go directly from the Celo Foundation to Maasai women, while NGOs can focus on the programmatic objectives and engagement with the community. Such design is maximizing the potential of blockchain technology to further strengthen the security of funds and reduce fraud risks while permitting NGOs to increase their operational capacities and reduce costly administrative and financial overheads.
Learning with and from communities
During the week of October 18–21, Emerging Impact and KotaniPay assisted the NGO partners in the week-long community inception and training meetings for all four targeted self-help women groups. The meetings took place near the sand dams to introduce the cash for work component and to explain the digital crypto-modality. During the registration and verification process women who lacked functioning phones were provided with the new feature phones; 40 devices were provided in a total cohort of 180 participants, with the remaining using phones they already had. NGOs collected ID numbers and phone numbers for KotaniPay to create wallets. In some cases, women provided phone numbers of their relatives, but further verification by field officers later during the week allowed them to correct the mistakes.
Last week marked the beginning of the pilot implementation on the ground where the first group of participants (Tiamamut) started to receive digital cash on their phones. All partners returned to the field to monitor the process on the ground, gather learnings, and improve operations before the pilot scales to the total 180 participants. The pilot in Kenya will last for 5 consecutive weeks and will be completed in December. The results of the project and its evaluation, including feedback from all participants, will be published in January.
The pilot in Kenya is the first out of the three projects currently funded by Celo Foundation and implemented with technical advisory and implementation support from Emerging Impact. The upcoming Celo-based aid projects funded by Celo Foundation include pilots in Ecuador and in Haiti. Additionally, Emerging Impact is working with other leading international organizations to deploy similar c-USD-based programs in the Pacific.
To learn more about the background, challenges, and opportunities of digital cash assistance read Celo’s and Emerging Impact paper “Future-Proof Aid Policy”.
*Mambo Digital (Swahili: Things go digital)
