#214 Christopher Fabian & Shaun Conway: Unicef & Ixo: Towards More Transparent Humanitarian Projects

Transcript

hi welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the technologies projects and scarves shopping decentralization and the global blockchain revolution my name is to that sync with you and today I'm doing show by myself Brian Amer were unavailable so I thought I would bring you an episode here today about blockchain and humanitarianism it's a topic that we haven't really covered very much I mean a lot of the topics that we have on the show and projects we have on the show usually startups or you know for-profit entities or you know protocol projects but today we're actually going to be talking a lot about humanitarianism how blockchain can help you him help in humanitarian projects and who better to have as a

guest than our two guests today Chris Fabian who is lead at UNICEF ventures and co-founded the UNICEF innovation unit and we'll get to talk a lot more to Chris about UNICEF ventures and the innovation unit and the work that UNICEF is doing in promoting blockchain technologies as a means to improve humanitarian work and Sean Conway who is the founder of the exo foundation and EXO is an organization that is promoting an offering system for data-driven impact especially in the humanitarian space so thank you very much for coming on guys thanks for having us great to be here

so as we often do with our guests we like to sort get introduction and learn about your background in the space so perhaps starting with Chris tell us about your background and how you came into your current role at UNICEF I came into it totally by accident I come from sort of the world of tech startups and and making things at a really fast pace and I somehow ended up in an austere 72 year old international bureaucracy but I think that the a lot of the work that we work on in art that I did before was really about creating the space for new things that can fix really big problems and so before I was at UNICEF I was in Tanzania and I had companies that looked at connectivity and access to information

for profit and I didn't really know a lot about what UNICEF was but having now spent a few years in the organization I think it's about eight now I found that we can actually have that same startup culture and that same approach to solving problems using the technologies that we're all interested in but do it at really a global scale and I'm happy to talk a little bit more about the specifics of the work we do later in the episode so how do you I mean I guess we can talk about this later in the show but like how have you found tried to bring this startup culture into a seven-meter old very large international very political organization I mean I think it's a lot about resolving two different kind of orders of magnitude of problem solving

so like the startup world works really fast and works really aggressively and likes to smash things and international bureaucracies work really slowly at big scale and like to not smash anything at all and so a lot of what our team does is try to translate that and we build a lot of prototypes we build a lot of physical prototypes of things which are actually software or data we show those to people we work with them and we work a lot with partners so partners of ours that are in the tech world can also show us what's coming and I think we try to generally introduce those to an environment that is really not a risk accepting environment and we've had some successes and more failures but it's it certainly gives us a scale of operation UNICEF is five and a half billion

dollars a year as an organization it works in 195 countries and they're 12,000 people that's 12,000 people who are nodes in our network you know who we use to find out about new things to find out about hard problems and who become our partners in building stuff and that's that's a kind of really amazing scale to be at and how did you become interested in blockchain technology accidentally as well a lot of stuff happens by accident we've got a great engineering team in Ventures and both Mike fabric an and COO say Jota who have been working with us on various software development projects talking about blockchain and distributed ledger for a long time and then it's

obviously like the dumb ones like me that just pick it up later we we try to look at technologies for investments that are three to five years out and in terms of kind of being out in production so about two years ago we did our first experiments with public blockchains and and they totally failed and and I'll tell you that story cuz a lot of fun but we you know we got a sense that this was something that was moving and the way that our team evaluates potential areas of investment is by looking at industries that are at a hundred billion dollar market cap and problems that can affect a billion people so that's our sort of heuristic for what we look at and and you know is there something that's got a trajectory to that hundred billion and of course three years ago 100 billion seemed like crazy as a you

know a figure to talk about in the crypto space it seems remarkably uncrazy now so we found that like with drones like with data science like with augmented reality this is very clearly a set of technologies that we want to learn about work with and invest in and we think that can actually positively in effect affect and infect the work that UNICEF does cool and Sean actually so Sean I met in Cancun over lunch eating burritos and having margaritas and he told me all about EXO foundation I thought it was really fascinating project and actually she was Sean who sort of connected me to Chris and and you know Sean Sean will be talking a little bit about the collaboration that

they have with UNICEF but we are gonna have Sean on the show a little bit later and maybe in a few months or so to talk very much in depth about his project but so Sean tell us a bit about yourself and in your background in this space yes I guess I've got a a crazy party here I trained as a physician and I work for most of my career in international development and and health and I guess the real kickstart to that was around twenty years ago when the when the hiv/aids epidemic was really showing its head here in South Africa so I was a young physician working in the government hospital services and was given a project to look at some

statistics and so with Excel spreadsheets you know looked at at the estimates of what the epidemic was going to look like and it was was very clearly an exponential epidemic and and I got really charged up about this and thought what we need to do something we need to do something that's going to be an exponential response and for me the use of data to drive all kinds of development initiatives whether that's to to influence market prices of medicines or to plan out you know the the demand for health workers or right down to a patient level sort of tracking over a

long period of time the clinical parameters that show whether you're having success or not in a treatment regimen that was really important to me and so I got fascinated by the use of data within developments and so all of my careers really really been about entering on data-driven projects and data-driven ventures including some nonprofits and and and and this latest adventure that we that we've launched so that's a good segue into excel foundation tell us about about this this project and what are the goals here yeah so around four years back I was actually taking a bit of a career break and was

lying on a hammock in Sri Lanka of all things and the great internet connection their 4G connection and I was thinking about how to solve the problem of supply and demand within services that seemed to always have an increasing demand and never enough supply and the supplier is usually driven institutionally and we've been working on on models of care delivery and and social support delivered through networks of community agents and and the real challenge there is you know how do you collect the data how do you incentivize how do you move information around these decentralized networks how do you govern govern the transfers of value and and the information and I was I was lying this

you know surfing the web and saw some articles about Bitcoin and sort of had this Eureka moment and thought well wouldn't it be great if we could insert the information about the services that are being delivered into into these transactions and transfer value and informations information of value and value of information and and this would give us some proof of impact we could bring together financial accounting and performance accounting and so I thought that was going to be really easy this is four years back we got the opportunity to to test this out and in some proof of concepts in early childhood development and Chris I guess will will explain the context of of the UNICEF and investment into what we were doing and over the four years we've realized that we have a

core set of standards and operating principles that we can draw on that have become standards for the decentralized whip and I can I can talk about that in more detail so it's we've kind of stumbled upon a really exciting development in terms of core standards at a protocol level that can be applied across all of the impact space and it's really about taking data and turning that into into assets that can be tokenized so impact assets and inso impact tokens and I can talk about that a bit later absolutely that sounds really fascinating I mean of course one of the great benefits of blockchain is having

some sort of traceability and coming back to so in this initial event and if you can second is if you can if you can trace the source of funding to an impact you write of like how we spend that money and the impact and the result of how you spend that money then you use some reputation system there where for instance say like a sort of humanitarian organization then has like proper reputation and credibility about how they're spending their funds and the actual impact on the ground rather than just you know how much money they're raising or like how many people they're reaching or you know some results that don't really have a whole lot of meaning yes so in this development space the catchphrases are accountability and

transparency and they've been a number of initiatives over certainly the last decade I'm really pushing accountability and transparency and sends certainly blockchain technologies provide for this but they also provide for for more than that there's the opportunity we see to create a new form of capital a new form of economy the impact economy which values the impacts that are being delivered through organizations that are that are making a difference in the world you know and so when we starts to count what matters and value what counts we can we can generate new forms of economy you know so as we all know you know bitcoins

have came from nothing and now it's a hugely valuable part of of the economy now why can't we start to value impacts that are relevant to our sustainability and to our well-being a society that would be very valuable indeed so I will come back to to EXO towards the towards the end the show to talk about your collaboration with with UNICEF so back to Chris most people are familiar with UNICEF I mean most people have seen the little orange boxes you know next to cash registers and convenience stores or just retail stores and like growing up in Canada I remember seeing like UNICEF commercials on TV and of course like it

brings up all these you know really positive things of like helping kids and and in in the developing world but you know remind our listeners like what is UNICEF as an organization like this part of the UN's maybe talk about that and also what are the goals of that organization sure so it's an interest in pom Plex place and then I sort of learned more about UNICEF every year that I'm there I actually didn't know a lot about UNICEF when I joined and so I came from this kind of world of fast paced stuff and I I guess I had the same recollections you did like something about kids and it was like a pretty nice organization it wasn't mean like UNICEF didn't do mean things what I've learned over the last few years is that it actually does a lot more than just not

doing mean things UNICEF is the world's largest humanitarian organization for children and when it when the organization focuses on kids focuses on the most vulnerable and I think that's one of the reasons that a lot of our team work in our job so almost all of us come from the tech world but there's a clear mandate in the organization to fight against bullies and bullies can be physical bullies or system bullies things that make the world unfair and by most vulnerable we quantify that by looking at bottom quintile of people economically but there are many many types of vulnerabilities so economic vulnerability is only one and so this is an organization that literally fights for the kids that are that are left behind that other people don't fight for and I think that's really nice that's something that we can all kind of get

behind we all feel good waking up with that as the mandate specifically UNICEF works with governments in 195 countries to create the right policies and governments that are that that make sure that kids are included but also to take action so we respond to emergencies UNICEF responded to over 350 emergencies last year and that's about two billion dollars of emergency supplies and that means getting things to communities faster than anybody else getting the right things there and making sure that communities can rebuild so our team was in Liberia during the Ebola crisis which was the most scary I think most scary things I've ever done working with communities there to make sure that information could flow that kids could get information about hand-washing that we could know when schools were being

closed and so on and and that's that's the on-the-ground part of what UNICEF does the other thing that UNICEF does is at a system level make sure that the right policies are in place for inclusion for making sure that kids with different or disabilities kind of are able to be in a common space for learning and opportunity and choice and we also buy a lot of stuff UNICEF's the world's largest single purchaser of pencils fun fact but we also buy thirty four percent of the world's vaccines and that's important when you buy that much stuff that's a billion dollars a year of vaccines more than a billion when you buy that much stuff you have the ability to move markets and this I had no idea about when I joined UNICEF at all and what that means is you can sit together with the big pharma companies and make

sure that there's fair open and transparent pricing on vaccines that's incredibly important so all of those three levels the sort of programmatic work doing stuff the sort of policy work and the the financial work come together and make a very nice environment for a team like ours which looks at new technology and you could imagine that you know we try to turn the gears of UNICEF's education or health systems strengthening and and turn them faster and and by using those three levels so making sure that we're building products on the ground with with users making sure we're working with governments so the right policies are in place to take those technologies and then working with big companies to make sure they understand that there's a market even in parts of the world that they might not consider their main their main kind of

market I like this idea of like UNICEF fighting bullies wherever they wherever they appear whether they be corrupt governments or corporations or illness or malnutrition those are all the all the bullies that UNICEF goes out and tries to fight against by implementing policy and like getting people to keep their minds about certain ways and things ways of thinking etc so you mentioned that you worked in in Liberia what are some of the most impactful things you think that UNICEF is doing today you know aside from obviously like delivering vaccines to young people with illnesses that might end up killing them

or delivering pencils to kids that need them in schools so I think that um structurally UNICEF is is looking at the biggest weaknesses in system so the reason that I mean people are poor because systems are unfair and and when you're poor you don't have the ability to go to a good school you don't have the ability to have action and to have an opportunity and choice vector in front of you you're kind of left behind so I think the most important thing that UNICEF does is ensure that every kid try to ensure that every kid try really hard to ensure that every kid has equal access to opportunity and choice and I'll give you an example if your so they're 55 million people who are children 55 million young people who are on the move because of war or violence

but you know inconceivable number there's no way to make 55 million makes sense anyway so 55 million kids who don't have access to the things that many of us take for granted a health system a school an identity and so the type of work that UNICEF does with refugees is make sure that that five-year-old refugee kid has some semblance of normalcy that they can go to a school that they can be around other and it's not only to be nice it's also really important to society when you have imbalance when there is unfairness and inequity and inequality societies come apart and you can see this in the world today you see the strains of inequality everywhere and and this is how a dialog that could be very condensed and

connected has become very polarized and so I think when UNICEF works with refugee populations for example we not only make sure that their systems to give kids health care and vaccines but also that those kids once they get the right nutrition and the right education have some access to opportunity have some idea of how to be part of the world and that sounds very lofty but I think it's really important when we were in Liberia during Ebola there were these there's a group of 14 15 year-olds who were in the most hard-hit part of Monrovia there's a peninsula in the city that had been really cut off and quarantined and we met them after we got there in November I think October on the end of October we met these young people who were literally going door to door

with notepads and asking questions of households in their neighborhood and telling information that was important to other young people to adults saying you know don't don't wash dead people and things like that we worked with them to build a system and I can talk about it a little bit more but we worked we were like okay so you guys are the heroes of the Ebola outbreak you are literally in the most difficult places it was 45 degrees it was muddy they were walking on with with boots you know rubber boots on and this paint pads of paper and we worked with him to build up a system that so that they could use their phones to SMS in that information more quickly I don't think that there was any genius and that we literally looked at people who had a brilliant idea but maybe not all the access to

networks and things that that we do and help them build something that made their job better that made them create more balance in the world around them interesting so so there have been some so I guess the innovation unit then has produced some some projects that have been valuable and have have had positive outcome I'd like to ask you then sort of you've been with UNICEF for a number of years now and sort of been the humanitarian space do you think that the world is is tending towards less inequality like so like if you were to look at like results of actions sort of impact that use have had 15-20 years ago and the

impact that is having now and so the result of that do you see that we're moving towards an in an improved situation or is it staying the same is it is it degrading I'm gonna go with Jack Ma on this one and say that the next 30 years looks really bad for Humanity I think that you see aggregate gains so UNICEF was started as the United Nations International Children's emergency fund after World War two my mother still has a blanket that my parents my mom was a refugee she still has a blanket from the version of UNICEF that existed then that was the organization was founded to respond

particularly to children who were displaced after World War two and the e the emergency was taken out of the name about twenty years later because it's like this should be for all children I think we see an aggregate good change in the world like on a Gregorian those 55 million refugee kids and us who have houses and infrastructure is growing greater and that really worries me you have a country like Malawi we've just opened the for the largest humanitarian drone testing corridor in the world in Malawi is 6500 square kilometers 400 meter vertical incredible opportunity for young Malawi and engineers and techies to work on drones but Malawi has 18 million people more than half of them are under 25 years old

and the major economic hope for them is a coal factory that's being built so I I really worry about that inequality about the inequity that we see in front of us about the fact that the the technologies that are coming into currency in the in wealthier countries were wealthier parts of wealthier countries are built on disparity the training sets were using for modeling and are not fair the genomic samples that we're using for building medicines are not fair they're not equitably sourced from from all of humanity and that creates in equity that doesn't necessarily appear at global statistics like there are fewer big Wars now sure but that really shows itself acutely in the places where there's the most weakness the most

system weakness and our team tries to address a lot of those things sorry I know that's a more bleak answer than maybe one would expect hey youyou tell the truth I mean I I do sort of agree with you that you know as an aggregate and we see less Wars and like less massive extinctions of you know human population as we did maybe like a hundred years ago or more recently than that but that we do see growing inequalities amongst you know the most privileged people and those are the least privileged and I think that that's something that we should all that that's a gap that we should all try to narrow and I think that one of the ways that one of the

tools for that maybe maybe you know blockchain technologies and we'll talk about how that can be applied so moving to the more like the technology side how much of UNICEF's resources and like the the mandate of UNICEF generally how much of that goes into developing new technologies for humanitarian reasons so a lot of I mean UNICEF is a big five it's at five and half billion dollar organization most of our money goes into kind of core work and for us core is delivering services to the most vulnerable children we don't we try really hard not to fetishize technology or to you know make

technology be the goal in itself and so we don't have a huge budget and our team has not ever wanted a huge budget I think we do a lot by being kind of lean and aggressive and small and hungry and so if you look at sort of how UNICEF invests in technologies we are a I mean our regular resources the funding that we took from core UNICEF last year was like you know less than a million dollars a tiny and all the rest of the money that we use we raise through our venture fund and through other mechanisms but we invest in these early very high-risk areas and as they develop as they become more sure UNICEF puts its organisational so behind them and an example of that is the work that we did with with SMS as a

basically as a command line for international development so over the last eight years we piloted prototype and built systems for using a text message to send like very important information about health systems how many vaccines are left in a health center how many kids are in school on a given day and to do that all on a basic Nokia 1100 you know like a phone that has nothing else that can stay charged for days weeks and so we basically built this operating system for International Development that allowed us to do our job better but also allowed us to connect with people like these kids in Liberia and hear from them in real time and we put you know a bit of our investment into that we put a lot of our time into it that's not an organizational priority that system called rapid Pro is a platform with more

than four and a half million active users it's in 35 countries 39 countries maybe now and that's a platform that's an open source cloud-based enterprise SMS and other information moving system and that's something that is a core UNICEF priority so now there are millions of dollars being invested in getting that into government scaling that up working with new partners and it's taken a life of its own so I think that's what we try to do is really create those early prototypes build them to a point where they have some gas behind them and then get them out the door the muscle of UNICEF takes it from there and that's one of the reasons that a lot of us who are used to the fast-paced a sort of world of startups and and you know failing and crushing it and all of that kind of nonsense it's

one of the reasons that a lot of us are in UNICEF because we can actually see the extension of our work you can see when something's good how it goes big did you just make any Theory I'm pun there I did projects with gas behind them yeah I've got about like four of those and I'll reuse them that's great okay so let's let's dive into blockings then and and so the intersection between UNICEF and blockchains I'd like to ask you you give him just what the space looks like right now you know there's been a massive interest in watching in public blockchains especially in cryptocurrency in the last in the last you know three years but

most notably in the last few months how and and of course there's all the of permissioned and more private blockchain systems that we are seeing slowly but surely come into production and in more of the enterprise space how does unicef to evaluate evaluate the different technologies and the different types of networks that exists in the blockchain space today so we take the same approach to blockchain technology as we do to any of these other sort of areas where you have a large market force behind the technology and the

potential to solve big needs so other areas that we look at in a and analogous ways are drones and UAVs data science and machine learning so these are areas that are all kind of buzz buzz word e and buzz word be that some people really believe and some people think that they're gonna solve everything drones will be delivering everything some people think they're totally useless or scary or dangerous and there's a whole bunch of people in between so anytime we have a technology space and blockchain is one of them we try to principles and these are the UNICEF principles of innovation they're online that we created them after many many failures and they just make us we don't fail less but we fail in less stupid ways and these principles are things like design with the user or be

open source or you know be data-driven in your development so they're they're pretty basic but they're a rubric that we use when we're looking at a new tech space and so in the blockchain space I think there is a lot of hype and I think there is a lot of potential and I think actually crypto kiddies showed us that we're at a space where meet you see the network in efficiencies and you see where things can go right so we want to be careful of what we promise but we also want to be sure that taking advantage of new things and making the world more efficient there there's three ways that we looked at we look at sort of public permissionless blockchains and distributed Ledger's the the first is that we there's clearly a road for fundraising and for for

transactions coming in to organizations that are doing good now we've seen this with the Red Cross they're already using digital currency accepting donations in eath and in Bitcoin we have we've seen this now that like yesterday the pineapple fund launched so that's 83 million dollars of bitcoins like 5,000 bitcoins that are available for charities and nonprofits so there's something that's happening in terms of resources and resource allocation and if I were putting digital assets into a in a you know an investment to fix the world I would want the transparency and the accountability that public block chains bring I would rather have that than just give a dollar and hope that it gets to somebody so I think that we see an opportunity for a different type of

engagement with people who want to fix the world and we've had really nice notes we've got a public etherion wallet and people have been just dropping little bits of ether in there and we got a really nice note from somebody just random guy and he's like listen I I put in like I don't think it wasn't very much then but we're happy with it yeah there's like point one ether ID he's like I did this he's like I just want to be part of something that's that's fixing the world I just I like this feeling here's you know here's something I think we need to understand that better I think there's a lot that we can do to reshape the way that funding streams work and development financing works and that's very exciting and it's very kind of macro the second level that we look at is internal and it's about

reducing the friction inside of a big bureaucracy how do we make sure that when we're paying a vendor or we're moving money to a government or we're moving money across offices that we have transparency accountability and speed how do we UNICEF has a complex organization but we are represented by contracts how do we make sure that our contracts are also represented publicly and intelligently and we're so we're testing out in our office in Kazakhstan we just did a hackathon on smart contracts for bureaucracy where we brought about 200 kind of crypto folks together and we're like here's an insane UNICEF contract represent that you know I don't know in solidity or like to go do something with it and they're like wow that really is an insane contract if we can start to describe those things

publicly we can bring them into that global view and we can optimize them and then the last area that we look at is direct investments into early-stage companies so like the company that we invested in that Shawn ran in South Africa companies that are using crypto technologies or blockchain technologies to try to fix something and we have a small venture fund that allows us to make directed hundred thousand dollar investments of capital non-dilutive capital into these kind of companies that are really trying to solve acute problems with distributed ledger and that for us is creating a portfolio of opportunity those are high risk investments for us our investors know that but that's where we also get to see things in action things failing and changing and turning and twisting and that's the venture part of our work okay

so if I just recap them so there's three levels of how you evaluate this technology the first being looking at sort of public networks and so the applications that we are starting to see emerge there one of which of course being funding and in your case the the so the benefit there is having that sort of transparency you mentioned having a multi-sig wallet so people can donate funds and like there's a sort of not a trail there of like what funds are being donated everybody can see it and then potentially at some point in there you can sort of plug in another system where you would have like proof of proof of impact or something like that right like that's publicly visible and so made available through everyone for everyone to audit the second would be sort of improving

streamlining internal processes and procedures within the organization this is a tough this is sort of an area that I'm very much interested in because my company does this for enterprise so like you know I like this idea right of being able to streamline through sort of more consortium block chains and being able to automate a certain number of things within an organization and the third then would be so investing in innovative technologies and identifying opportunities through the venture arm so if we if we because we are going to talk to Sean about about his project and and touch more about the venture arm in a few minutes but coming back to the two first layer so Pollak blockchains and

the consortium networks have this idea you know running around my head for quite some time now a couple years and you know I think that it would be interesting to consider as a thought experiment a sort of public consortium blockchain that would be run by nonprofit organizations for the purpose of improving transparency and accountability within all those organizations so take like UNICEF and like Doctors Without Borders and like Red Cross and you know just take like the the top 100 humanitarian nonprofit

organizations in the world and have them be validating nodes for something like a tenement blockchain and have that platform be the basis upon which you can then build all types of applications so one of them could be like funding right we want to have transparent traceable accountability in funding and we want to have a system upon which we can do that that scales at a high level where you know we it runs globally it's compliant across the world right and like we can build this on this platform and then take another application I don't know like voting governance you know who are the board members of these organizations

how do we elect people on the ground like local offices and things like that is this something that you know is conceivable today like because I feel like at least for now for the next couple of years public blockchain infrastructure such as aetherium it's not gonna scale I think Vlad Zamfir just put a tweet yesterday actually saying that like nothing's in productions nothing is close to being production and deploying a consortium blockchain within an organization sort of is limiting that organization when there's just so much more that can be done yeah what are your thoughts on that it is not only possible but there I think our notional artifacts now that

show that it's it's probable and likely so I think that there's a lot to be too you know if you look at like fractional-reserve development so not everything needs to be on public blockchains and i think one of the things that Shawn did in the early days of our investment with Trust lab was actually look a lot at a kind of dual or you know Multi multi blockchain projects we believe I think what we're seeing from our experimentation and our investments is that we can create a network and we can use UNICEF's trust to validate parts of that network and we have enough corporate partners and other developing partners that would also be interested in being part of such a network that could do a bunch of things so I think the answer is yes I agree

that that's a useful and necessary and possible thing and I would go even further and say that you know within that network which could be joint public and private you could also use public blockchains to start using transaction records to create soft identities for people you could start bringing in some of the large amount of charitable or you know human investment money that I'd mentioned earlier into that system you could validate that and you could probably back that Network you know fractionally with something like ether so I think it's a very interesting idea to explore and it's a conversation that's a type of conversation we're having with a lot of our partners and we'd be happy to hear from others who are interested in being in that space cool so you mentioned this

experimentation you did with with Athenian aetherium smart contract multi-sig Wallet and there was a blog post out but will be likely to in the show notes measles experimentation like what are the goals and what did you learn sure so this was under the the part of our you know the part of our job where we're like let's just try this and really hope that we don't break anything too much this was when we were and this is you know considering ether not as a currency but just as a digital token we wanted to see if we could as a large international organization accept tokens from others and do things with those tokens that was the premise of our work we had a contact and the crypto world is amazing and incredible we had a contact

from somebody in in Switzerland who said that he was auctioning off some some posters and that he would like to send us some ether from the auction we needed a way to be transparent about accepting those non currency non valued tokens into UNICEF so we created a nice kind of multi-sig set up with me and my fund co-founder Sunita and koozai linking it to our UNICEF identities which are publicly available and attributable and and we created the smart contract to actually accept donations from this auction and actually helped him build his side of the smart contract as well and we set it up I think we got you know two ether out of that and it was really interesting it it showed that we could

do something it showed that we could set up an etherium node on UNICEF architecture like that was nice it showed that we could have a transparent way of receiving tokens not funds because to receive funds we have to have our lawyers clear things and that's definitely not what we were doing but also that we could do that in a way that was public and described and start to get public support from the crypto ecosystem so it did a bunch of things it let us play around but it also started creating a buzz with the networks that we like that we were doing something new and so that that wallet is still up it's transitioned from being an experiment to actually being discussions inside of UNICEF on what it would look like on how you would create an asset class for cryptocurrency if that was a

donation where you would put those assets how you would value them and so on so it's really been that prototype of the future that we like to build and hopefully it's provoked enough discussion that it serves its value we haven't moved any of that ether out yet so that's something that we're gonna be doing over the next few months is looking at like what do we do with those digital tokens that are certainly not money and how we how we use them in a way that shows what a future of transparent investments of non-monetary things could look like that's interesting that you say that that they're not money because I mean like in most jurisdictions I think governments would consider I know that in the US for instance you cryptic ranches are considered a form of currency is this I was speaking of my naive view at the

time that we set this contract of how a digital token was valued and that I certainly our team never went into it thinking that there was a financial implication behind it okay I understand okay and it looks like you felt like two point seven one seven either now and yeah other tokens like data coin for instance you get five cents of those how many people keep spreading things around right is what I want to know okay and so I'd like to bring the discussion take it take a step back a little bit and talk about and talk about sort of watching adoption and so as a as a technology evangelist I think I would call feiyu as promoting

blocking within the UN can you give us some insight about you know what response this has gotten you know how do people respond to this idea people are responding well I think that you know the future is a scary place so we try to evangelize with a sense of possibility and then also a sense of looming fear and that's how we try to bring products into into the limelight koozai is our blockchain lead he is an incredible evangelist of the technology and has presented our work much better than I do at fora like the World Bank so he presented to sort of senior World Bank leadership at the State Department at various UN venues and at universities

and we've what I think we've seen from his presentations and the networks that we're building is that there is a sense of opportunity a desire for direction an interest in following the principles that we've set up and an ability to do some quick rapid prototyping in various organizations inside of the UN I think that one of the things we're trying to be very careful of is making sure that we keep the direction towards public permissionless blockchains as much as possible and that's really that's really to keep lined up with our principles which are very firmly rooted in the open source tradition but also to make sure that we don't put ourselves in a position which we were in in the mobile an SMS space in 2009 where we had one company who owned a lot of our infrastructure or owned a lot of our

data so we're trying to make sure that we're creating that internal sense of possibility but also keeping the market open so that as different protocols develop on different blockchains we're able to be flexible and we're not locked into any one vision of the future there are other organizations that are doing prototypes and tests a blockchain we work together through the UN innovation network which we co-chair with the World Food Programme and that brings together nerds from across the agencies to sort of share what we're doing and and so that's kind of publicly documented I think we'll be putting out our our most recent report on like what's the state of blockchain in the UN in a few weeks I just saw a draft yesterday great can you expand on some of these experimentations is that something you can talk about at

this time sure I can speak to our own failures better than anybody else's we so we started looking at using the Bitcoin blockchain as a way of holding identity in the transaction kind of hashing up an image and holding that as a person's identity that was like two years ago that was very expensive even then and that was also are fumbling around with the concept of big online databases so that didn't work but we did some experiments with that and that you know there's a lot of talk about like Oh blockchain means identity and it's a you know as we all know it doesn't mean identity explicitly it can mean identity if a certain set of conditions are met so we but we tried with is very explicit identity like let's hold an identity on the Bitcoin blockchain that didn't that

was interesting but didn't work we played around with this smart contract we've seen that WFP is doing some things with private aetherium nodes for refugees in the middle east for kind of payments and a payment system there I think we're seeing a lot of interest in the smart contract side of things so as I mentioned our office in Kazakhstan is trying to describe some of its very difficult and and and complicated contractual stuff in a way that could be publicly accessed so those are the those are the sort of the initial pointers that we see and we're trying to document them and just learn from them and those are all on UNICEF stories org slash blockchain as much as we know as much as we can capture them and when when you

present these use cases and these experimentations internally what kind of reaction are you getting from you know people that I've been I I would say like in the the more conservative side of an organization like the UN or UNICEF I mean we've presented drones you know like as a widow you could move health supplies with drones and and had people say like don't do that drones kill people I mean so we're very used to this reaction we try it when we tried to bring SMS as like a data platform in 2009 or 8 we were like don't use SMS this is what we were told don't use SMS use VHF radios they're much better for moving data so we're sort of used to the

resistance of you know of a way of doing things against the future I think that the D complicating the technology is important explaining that this is not really that new in a sense like databases distributed databases have existed for a long time and making very clear use cases of how this technology can be applied to ongoing work are are the three important things like if you say do you want to use a distributed ledger to make your job better I think people will kind of throw up their hands at that if you say I've taken the contract that you use for paying your partner in in the government and I've put it in a way that makes it faster and cheaper for you to do it here's how much it cost you before it used to cost this much for a transaction because of all

the paperwork and the people and then and now it costs you one tenth of that here it is then they're like wow okay I get that and I see how that can be applied operationally so that's the process we follow with any technology like make it useful to the user build it in a concrete way get rid of the jargon and the flash and be boring like be superb or a contract is a boring thing that's great like I like being boring and and so I think that that gets more of a transaction happening sense of transactions happening in the organizational lymphatic system the more boring and simple you are now definitely echo that sentiment to anyone who's explaining any of the technology to anybody who's typically wearing a suit you know try not to geek out about it

just just be boring about it and don't miss an iota don't talk about the tangle don't don't mention a nota and and and definitely yeah if you can if you can show some sort of return on investment or show how this technology will make their job better or reduce operational frictions or reduce paperwork or the time it takes to do certain thing that's definitely a direction I take and but but it is hard to find to find those of those those key metrics that you can point to because it's just the state of where we're at right now where a lot of this stuff is still experimental we're not experimenting with like real data a lot of like parts of the stack that are still not you know quite there yet

in order to bring things to production so you know I think slowly it's getting to a point where we can say oh we've experimented like we've been able to show that we were reduce cost by X amount but it's it's it's taking a while to get that wheel turning but I think we're like if you know if Kitty's brought the whole thing down if like 12 kitties per second brought the whole thing crashing down for a little bit that's that should tell us how humble we have to be you know and I think it's totally fine to design for the future and I we try to do that a lot but I think we need to be very explicit about that like we're creating a runway for the organization to be more efficient it may not be this year it may not be in the next 18 months but at some point

these small experimentations and the investments we put into them will pay off and I think we have to you know you can create you can value future options in finance so you can do that so I think if we consider blockchain like we consider artificial intelligence which doesn't that means less than blockchain to me but you know those types of fields as potential future options we can then be in a better position to talk about them because we don't have to prove something right now we can say this is the process of experimentation we're going through this is our hypothesis this is what we think will happen and and this is the runway of time that we expect to see results in but I do think that the you know some of the very basic organizational descriptions that you can do through a smart contract will be

immediately interesting to the people in suits like that's a nice thing they like to see systems described and and I think that's where we're gonna see the first real impact inside of the organization which is awesome and our finance people are incredibly interested in this space and it's great to be able to have discussions with people who know a lot more about money than I do where there really part of the of the building process and I haven't seen that with like the SMS technology we didn't we didn't have that kind of Alliance inside yeah it is bringing together all of the different I guess like business units over an organization that that's that's what's so interesting but also it presents a big challenge

with this technology is that it doesn't only impact like this one little corner of your organization it's going to impact your entire organization and the way your organization in tracks and the broader ecosystem and I think that's that's a sort of paradigm shift and an idea that is as massive if not more I think even more massive than you know the idea of taking your you know paper card database and putting it onto a computer system you know which people had to you know juggle but I thought like 25 30 years ago so but before we move on to the to the venture arms you talk about the so the the strategy for the next you know 12 12 months and beyond so what is sort of the long-term

goals here in terms of how the UN and UNICEF is will be approaching the blockchain and implementing them in in in projects that have to act our timeline is pretty clearly aligned with the three levels that I described so we have a we have a set of sort of external funding accepting of cryptocurrency discussions that we are having now we believe that those will option out you know in the next six months that will have some answers from accounts and financing about how we can deal with cryptocurrency that's at that top level at the business process level we did a hackathon in Kazakhstan that was amazing

we're gonna do another one in the end of the first quarter of this year with another UNICEF country office where we're gonna bring the some of the Kazakhstan stuff to another region and be like this is the smart contract that we described here's how it could work let's try it in another office so we should have some internal momentum around that stuff by then of quarter one and then we have investments so we've got an arm of our team that does direct capital investments in companies and we have a call out for blockchain related companies now that is a call for companies that want 50 to $100,000 of capital investment and that's described on on our website as well and we hope that we'll be funding five to six

companies in the coming months that call closes at the end of January it usually takes us six weeks to eight weeks to make our funding decisions so we'd see those coming into play and of quarter to probably realistically so those are the three levels that we're working on as well as some you know secret stuff that we want to pull the curtain back on too far okay so that's good segue into our next topic which is the the venture arm I was actually surprised to hear that the UN had like properly venture funds to invest in startups but I guess it's like any organization you need to have that spark of innovation that comes from from a very agile organs startup Oh can you sort of talk about the types of

companies you're investing in and what are you looking for and startups that you're investing in so the fund is a relatively new vehicle Sunita grow to and I co-founded it about two years ago it it's based on you know our ideas of what what's best from the VC world which is like itself a very dodgy place sometimes and what's best from the world of development and what we try to do is create a hybrid model where we went to our LPS and investors and we pitched them on an idea of creating value out of open source intellectual property so we said look what if we don't want to hold on booked assets for UNICEF what if we want to create portfolios of technology that's curated that goes back to our LPS

that has a worth and if we could invest in five companies around data science in five countries that are interesting you know would that $500,000 investment potentially be worth more than $500,000 our initial investors said that that was a reasonable hypothesis they provided us with twelve and a half million dollars of initial investment money from four anchor investors and we've made our first seven or so ten that's now into private companies the fund only invests in companies that are registered in the countries that UNICEF works in which is interesting so that's the hundred and thirty five companies that we countries that we consider program countries so that's not they not us not Europe we only invest in

companies that are registered as for-profit so we don't do nonprofit kind of investments and we look at companies that have the potential for growth in their technology space we combine a set of companies so sean is currently alone in the in the blockchain portfolio but we're going to find some other investments to connect them with soon but in the space of drones or data science we try to to bring groups of companies together given the technical support from our team and from our partners that they need and and help them grow faster by being open source and working together in these spaces our investments actually get us a lot more than you'd think a hundred thousand dollar capital investment in burundi is quite a substantial investment to make and we find that these companies can

then grow to a second round of investment to graduation into acquisition and so on and we're gonna be seeing the first of those things happen in the next six months we also invest in some of the platforms that support this work so as I mentioned we've got the largest drone testing corridor in the world for humanitarian purposes that's an investment through the fund that is its own asset class that supports the individual vestments we make in drone companies so if you're the drone company we invested in Kenya you can come and use our corridor for free and that can accelerate your work so that the fund does those two things we are looking at and exploring how we could have a crypto denominated fund that would work along the same lines that is pending all of the review of the people that need to say that it's

okay to do that and it will break the system but we feel very positively about that as a possibility and we're also looking at another stage a second round of the fund which is shaped a little bit differently but but in general the investments that we've made cluster around these kind of emerging technologies that have a hundred billion dollar market cap behind them or more and that can address fundamental human needs though not with an explicit social good focus it's just that the company has to be good like they have to have good DNA so it's not a it's not a when BAC Fund in that sense oh that's very clear and so how big is this fund it's twelve point six million we've put out about five million of that and is it is it funded or where's the capital coming famines are coming from UNICEF

donations or you have external funders nothing that we do comes from the core UNICEF donations so this is from for LPS therefore anchor investors who came in to governments and to foundations they all have expressed sort of slightly different interest in the valuation of the IP so some of the government's are interested in using the procedures or the companies that we work with in their own internal arms the foundations have similar similar the divergent interests we were very lucky to have Sean and his team present at our first LPS meeting in New York a few months ago and show the progress that they've made and we had really good comments from the people who've invested in our fund that show that the types of technologies were investing in are actually pertinent to

their work so you know this is exciting for the investors because they see something that they maybe aren't able to play with exactly at the speed that we are great so I guess this is a good segue then into into a section of the show with Sean and Sean has received investment from from the UNICEF pension fund at least one of the projects Sean was working on previously did and so Sean can you tell us about that experience and how working with the UNICEF has benefited your your work and you also talk about that about the Excel foundation and this idea of proof of impact so I think we're all familiar with you

know the general approach and in blockchain solutions that you need to start off with some proof of concepts and so we were provided with some innovation funding from from an Innovation Fund here in South Africa to do a proof of an imp of concepts in the context of early childhood development solving a real-world problem which is how non-governmental service providers were delivering preschool services to children run about eight hundred thousand children in the country and make their claims for a daily attendance subsidy which is paid by the government now that's a boring problem it's you know making claims and getting paid for

them the the problem that has been identified there is lack of trust in the system and lack of administrative efficiency and a lot of gaps and and lack of information around where the needs are and where the money's going and so we were approached to to provide a use case implementation that sort of test of using blockchain for this very sort of practical real-world problem and and so we built a solution for that which is a product called amply and and we thought that would take you know six months to a year to to kind of prove out and and scale up well four years later

we've learned a lot of lessons and we have we have now scaled that and and and we have more than 50 thousand attendances recorded and we're now going into into sort of more production mode but along the way you know we needed to establish new kinds of partnerships to take this beyond one use case and one local implementation into the global potential that this has and a Chris has spoken about establishing platforms and and I think this is a really important concept you know with an important possibility within the blockchain or sort of the broader sort of set of technologies if we don't go beyond just

distributed legend we also talk about the new web standards for the decentralized web and new data technologies including machine learning and so on all of these disruptive technologies are coming together in ways in which we can we can have a really transformative effect on how information is collected how its how its valued how its exchanged and therefore the kinds of economy that we can we can enable through the use of information and so that's really where we've kind of migrated with the support from UNICEF from a local implementation on a very specific use case to a global potential and understanding that we can

we can take this fundamentally open source philosophy and standards that align with what's happening within the standard setting processes around the decentralized web and take them into a protocol that becomes a platform and so that's where the Excel Foundation has kind of taken the custodianship of this open source project and is seeking to to expand the the use cases of office and the implementation of this across a broad set of users with it with a growing network of partners so what do you see as the future here for the exo Foundation and the work that you're

doing with UNICEF I mean I suppose and and I hope that that this work and this platform will then benefit organizations like UNICEF that raise funds and that you know want to build reputation around proof like some kind of proof it there that their work is providing some kind of an impact and yes so so the the next phase is really being able to to systematize this and Chris has spoken about you know how once technologies are are proven UNICEF has the reach and the scale through its country offices and through its partnerships with other organizations to be able to take things to scale and I think that that's the

really critical thing for us now you know so it's been great doing the learning developing the and so on but how do we how do we go to the next level and get adoption of these technologies in ways that it can actually impact on on many many people's lives now we can't do that ourselves and we know we're not interested in in in in going in implementing the solutions in all different contexts what we want to support is the platform that enables other people to build on that so the analogy I guess is in the way in which the etherium network and and aetherium and smart contracts enable you know an open ecosystem to to exist creating

applications on a core protocol and the core set of of capabilities around compute and data storage and so on interesting well I definitely do hope that that you have a lot of great success in building this platform and we see all kinds of applications being built that are like providing a lot of value to people who really need it and so I believe it's just sort of starting as a project and you plan on launching this network what's the roadmap here yes so I'm so that the first step has been to formalize the open source project you know so in the same way as we have a kind of model around open source foundations like the Linux Foundation

Mozilla Foundation which we consortium and so on and we felt that the next step is is to establish this open source code base within an open community and a foundation model and to bring in key partners and so UNICEF is one of the partners we have singularity University adventures where the gold standard foundation and a number of other organizations that have an interest in in in in applying the protocol into use cases through their networks and so we focused mostly on organizations being participants in the network that have got their own networks and that creates

of course much bigger network effects and across the different organizations that that have have expressed an interest or have actually formed there's a number of very interesting used carbon carbon credits arising out of clean-burning cookstoves and linking health credits to that from the health prevention benefits of clean-burning cook stoves and heating across - impact bonds for education you know for young women in India or early childhood development impact bonds in in South Africa and so we have a whole range of use cases which will provide us with and further proof of the utility of

this protocol but also add to the software with reference implementations and and a growing data set around around sustainable development initiatives fantastic it's fascinating and so will well we're gonna have you back on in I guess a few months so to talk more in depth about or at length about about ik so and the protocol we can get into the technical aspects of of XO so we're looking forward to that thank you very much to the both of you for coming on today was a fascinating discussion and I

look forward to seeing you know the the I guess I'm I'm gonna I'm just gonna channel riceland mark here I'm looking forward to this you know humanist blockchain future where humanitarian work can be improved by by this technology and where organizations like UNICEF can be more accountable and where we can have actual proofs of the impact that organizations are providing on the ground for like kids in the sentence in this in this case so good job to both of you for your working on such a noble cause and thank you for coming on thanks

for having us thank Sebastian so thank you to our listeners for once again tuning in this show and lots of other great shows about blockchain and Bitcoin and all their technologies can be found at Bitcoin calm if you liked the show there's multiple ways you can support us one of those ways you can leave us an iTunes review it helps people find the show and you're always happy to see your reviews and you can also leave us a tip we accept tips in Bitcoin ether and now can pick on cash and the tipping addresses will be in the show description thanks so much and I look forward to you back next week