Kelly Robertson
Blockchain technology has applications beyond moving money from one account to the other. We have talked about it for quite some time now, and today we are looking at how the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is planning to put blockchain to exceptionally good use by tackling the child poverty issues.
Work in progress…
According to Christopher Fabian, co-founder of UNICEF Ventures, the organization has spent months discussing blockchain tech internally and how it can be used to address payments and identity problems in conflict areas.
He, however, is not sure that the technology is mature enough, but that hasn’t stopped him and his team from exploring all the different applications blockchain could be used for.
“I don’t think it’s quite there yet, but when we’re looking at problems like giving someone an identity when they don’t have a sovereign identity granted to them, or how you allow movement of money from one place to another quickly, those are things that blockchain starts to hint at,” Fabian told CoinDesk in February 2016.
He went on to add that he sees blockchain best suited for micropayments and identity use cases.
The first investment
In November 2016, UNICEF made its first investment into a blockchain startup; it was South Africa-based TrustLab — which used to be known as 9Needs — that is using blockchain to develop identity tools for early childhood education. Said company got roughly $100,000 from UNICEF to further scale its platform.
According to Fabian, TrustLab not only promotes social progress, but has what it considers a viable path to profit. “The sense of the company we got in talks with them, they seem like a really cohesive group of people using a sophisticated technology to solve a pressing set of problems,” he said.
The best part is that this likely won’t be the last startup that will get UNICEF’s backing, with the organization looking to invest in as many as five to ten blockchain startups in future rounds. Furthermore, the organization is looking to eventually integrate some of the technology these companies provide into its own operations.
“I believe that there is a very near future where we will be using blockchain, the bitcoin blockchain maybe, other distributed ledgers, to do central operational tasks,” Fabian said. “I don’t know what the sum total of those would be, but for us, investing in a company lets us start to see some of that future.”
UNICEF ICO in works?
In addition to embracing blockchain, UNICEF may also be working to create its own virtual token through an initial coin offering (ICO). According to Fabian, such custom cryptocurrency could help the organization further its mission or the goals of its partners.
“If we are in a place to look at designing our own token, look at others to help design theirs in a way that we can be a part of, and potentially also have a crypto-denominated investment fund, those would all be things that would be on our roadmap for the near future,” he told CoinDesk.
For what it matters, UNICEF is now running what Fabian believes is the first public Ethereum node managed within the U.N., and this serves them to learn more about the tech.
“We’re using that because we think it’s important for our team to understand [Ethereum smart contract language] Solidity and kind of have a sense of what an ERC token looks like, how that would work,” he said.
Next steps
All the blockchain-related work happening at UNICEF isn’t taking place in a vacuum, as the UN has been doing its own trials as well.
The UN’s Alternative Financing Lab has also tested the technology for uses in microfinance and connected devices. But UNICEF is obviously leading the way, and we can’t wait to see what they’ll do next.
We could image an ICO-backed project financing; it would help the organization get more funds, while at the same time help promote the use of blockchain. We could… but we’re not making the shots there… We’ll let you know when we hear something new. Stay tuned…
