Chris Fabian ~ Impact Track & Blockchains for Good UNICEF

[Music] my name is Chris I run UNICEF's ventures team Oh I'm gonna ignore you and I wanted to just follow up what I had said by talking for about 10 minutes about some really exciting things that we think are happening in the blockchain space globally but first of all I wanted to introduce what our team is I didn't know about UNICEF when I joined I did tech startups mostly in East Africa in the Middle East so I knew it was like this big organization something to do with kids so I don't know if that's sort of tracking with other people's ideas of it but I certainly didn't know that it was this organization that existed globally have such a big scope it's a five and a half billion dollar a year organization and it's an organization that does things like by a third of the world's vaccines which means that in addition to helping the most marginalized communities it can also do things like market shaping like making sure that companies are producing products that otherwise wouldn't necessarily get to market this is a network map that we did recently of UNICEF so these are all the people who communicate with each other and it's a kind of massively decentralized centralized bureaucracy but it's super old and so a lot of what Archie team tries to do we're a 20-person team within this is try to figure out how to get this organization into the future or at least into like like 1995 UNICEF was built to fight for the rights of the world's most marginalized people these are the bottom quintile the bottom 20% of people particularly kids and mothers who are kind of left out of everybody's Development Plan they don't make product development plans if you're a government they're like point C or D you know it's phase seven and the infrastructure that we take for granted never gets built for the bottom quintile and you can see that in this country as well as in the other 189 countries that we work in and so our team has tried to use some of the approaches that we think are valuable some of the things like the ability to move information quickly or the ability to start provoking idea around identity to make sure that what we see as the exciting things coming in the next 20 or 30 years are able to affect everybody positively and so I just wanted to tell basically like I'll tell you three things one is what keeps us up at night and I guess the second is what's keeping us in the office Wow look at that what's keeping us in the office late in the evening so if you've been following anything for the last six seven years you know that the number of people on the move is growing right now they're about 55 to 60 million kids who are on the move displaced because of war or violence these are kids that you now see a lot in the news either in the US or in Europe but have traditionally over the 20 years prior existed mostly in Central Africa and South Asia and these are kids who don't have a sovereign ID if you're a Syrian kid going through the refugee trail in Europe you probably go through five different paper IDs and each time at each country you're asked a set of horrible questions about what went wrong and and what happened to you to get here and that's difficult and it's uncomfortable and it doesn't need to be that way we're also we know that we're trying to respond to the most vulnerable populations in a time where climate is changing faster than ever and the areas in red are where you're going to see if climate stops at one degree Celsius which we don't think it is the areas in red where you're going to see a two to three percent drop in pee in per capita output and that is scary because those countries that are in red are offed in the countries where you have the highest population growth rates as well and the greatest lack of services we know that their awesome thing is coming like robots robots are cool robots are less cool if you are a woman if you are on the edge of a tightly bound social network or if you are one of the people in the bottom quintile and they're especially less cool if you're meeting all three of those criteria because you are the most vulnerable to automation it's most likely that your job gets automated and that you have nothing to flip your work into while people in urban areas who are well-connected wealthy white men get to take advantage of automation and also diseases move really fast now we saw this with Ebola outbreak we've seen it with avian influenza and so on so these are all sorry this is all the depressing stuff but this is the meaning that our team finds this is what we get up 4:00 in the morning and UNICEF works in a lot of emergencies as well over 300 in the last two years but so as we were kind of looking at how we could use text messages to move information more quickly or use distributed databases to look at providing identity we also tried to eat our own dog food um and I wanted to just show you something this is a new project that just got launched officially two days ago in Dubai this is a map of Colombia and this is a map of 60,000 schools in Colombia it's a map of connectivity so the schools that are in green have 3G you can do a Skype in those schools you can communicate well the schools in yellow have two G you can make a phone call or send an SMS and the schools in red have no G there's no connectivity in those communities no access to information it really doesn't matter how distributed your ledger is it won't get there yet and this is a map for us of inequality and it's a map of what we can do to advance the world because there's a hypothesis that if you're connected to opportunity and choice you live a life with a little bit more dignity but let me show this is interesting so this is a similar map of the US and as we focus on kind of these externalities and all of the things around us we sometimes forget that the walls that we build as a as a human species are internal in their walls of poverty and lack of access if you look at where people don't graduate from school here it's exactly an inverse of that connectivity map and it shows you that problems that we're facing as UNICEF that we're working towards as this big international organization are present here if you look in Colorado if you look at Southeast Colorado you see these same types of problems and issues magnified and you see problems that we're used to thinking about as developing world but in fact they're just problems of inequality we wanted to test this is this is a total lie I'm showing you something that does not exist but that's okay it's a hackathon about a year ago we thought wouldn't it be great if there was some way to gather up this information about school connectivity and where schools were and weren't connected and allow governments or others who are interested to fund it it broke with Metta masks everything breaks with Metta masks but wouldn't it be great if we could allow people to start funding this and this is a map of Kyrgyzstan Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia pays seven times as much for their kilobyte as Kazakhstan the neighboring country does that's the disparity and we talk to the government of chaos and they're like it should be fair and open and people should be able to see how much we're paying and we thought wouldn't that be a great application for some kind of accountable ledger where you could see the schools again Green is good connectivity red is really bad connectivity and where you could start to see with your funding with your input where you were producing human value this doesn't exist but it shows you the approach at least that our team is taking to addressing some of these problems or having discussions in a slightly new way we also wanted to test out how we could find and identify companies working in the blockchain space so as I mentioned in January we had a workshop of the first six companies that we've invested into our venture fund we've got a 20 million dollar early stage seed fund that does his investments purely an open-source tech we picked six companies from around the world I love it we picked six companies from around the world and brought them together brought them to New York we're funding them for a little more than half a million total and these are companies that are doing everything from authenticating supply chain for vaccines in India to looking at how you can parcel up connectivity a gigabyte into kilobytes and a kilobyte into bytes and a bite into I don't know Satoshi's in Bangladesh and be able to resell those pieces of connectivity and we're looking at a company in also in Mexico that's using vaccine records and provision of medical prescriptions to actually empower people to get make sure they're getting the right drugs and these are companies that we wouldn't have found easily it took us quite a bit of searching but we believe that the global infrastructure that we have and that the etherium foundation represents and with all of you in the room can help accelerate these companies and show some real proofs of concept quickly the last thing I'll say is that we do want to test something with everybody today and we're super psyched to be working with eath Denver and everybody else on a new approach to engaging particularly developers but but also a broader audience in this type of positive action so Christina here leads our blockchain product she's in the front row waving there and has been developing the idea around the boost token for the last month or two we wanted to test out and you can go to the Colorado at bounties network to see it we wanted to test out what would happen if we started to create some tokenization around social good and to do it in a space that was controlled sort of like a hackathon so we're gonna see how this works we're looking for people who are either helping to contribute to the external economy or looking at building up impactful products everything from code to to commenting to translation and then we have some pretty exciting opportunities to benefit from this as well we're gonna be joined by a few friends from Newsweek who are about to put out a serious issue on blockchain for social good and they've kindly offered to help with some of the mentorship and exposure for the projects that come out of these two days and also for potential further funding for other bounties so really exciting to hear what you think about that and you can find out a bit more about it here I'm gonna go to the next slide but it's Colorado is that bounties no up there it is it's everywhere if you want to read more about the work that I mentioned I don't want to take up a ton of time on an evening please feel free to find us online we're pretty active on social and we look forward to being here with you for the next few days thank you [Applause]