Unicef 🛠 Innovation at Unicef

[Music] GM to everyone uh my name is Arun maharajan I am the blockchain lead within the UNICEF office of innovation more specifically the ventures team so I'm here to help you guys make sense of the unive Innovation hackathon at uh at you know e Global uh so for uh those of you who do not know about UNICEF I'll give a bit of an intro let me share my screen hope you can see my screen yeah there you go so uh yeah for those of you who are not aware of Unicef so we are a UN agency we have been around since 1946 uh we work in 190 countries U essentially our goal is to improve the lives of children and young people around the world uh we do a whole lot of things in a whole lot of areas uh as you can imagine it's not an easy mandate to to fulfill so it it cuts across very serious nutrition social policy water education so on in this hackathon we will focus on a couple of these topics um and then uh let's see what we come up with of course we have a huge focus on on Innovation um and and that is primarily led by the UNICEF office of innovation that that that I am I am a part of um one interesting thing maybe I can show you guys the UNICEF Venture fund uh website so this this is the team that I'm part of Unicef Ventures so we uh have a few parts in the team we of course invest in uh early stage uh Frontier Tech Solutions including blockchain web3 from emerging markets that can benefit children youth we also build internal prototypes in the various Tech areas that we are part of and we also interface and work very closely with the digital public withs Alliance and we are a big fan of um uh open source so that those are some of the things um that we that we do U we have a whole big portfolio a lot of it is in blockchain I think about 19 of them if I'm not mistaken yeah 19 19 Investments made uh it's uh it's you know pretty cool so I would suggest you uh you check out uh this website you can you can go through our portfolio uh you can of course filter it uh with blockchain and you can check out what all projects are there if you're interested in the other areas of course please go ahead um although we invest in open source Solutions we are interested in our startups making Revenue getting acquired so all of that is also important so it's not just for a charitable cause it's also for from the startups perspective uh to to in a Thrive right um and and we have invested in in a whole lot of places so I I would like highly highly suggest that you take a look at this to get an idea of the team that is sponsoring this U hackathon now coming back to the hackathon so so we have been working with the blockchain since 2015 uh and our first pilot was in fact with the Bitcoin blockchain I think ethereum didn't exist around the time of this uh pilot where we tried to put hashes of photos on China as a method of validating ID U and since then we have made a lot of progress we have we have some smart contract work some some some tokens and and and and even a DA which we are building uh right now uh we also operate the UNICEF crypto fund uh which is uh I think the first of its kind um we definitely the first UN agency to operate fund such as this where we um not only receive crypto but we keep it as crypto and then we spend it as crypto most of it has so far been used to fund the startups that the Venture fund uh works with so for example if like one of you uh do does very well in this hackathon and then later on wish to build up that idea that winning idea into a startup into a registered uh private entity we'll of course uh be happy to talk to you um further when it comes to getting a seed funding of up to $100,000 for example yeah so there are various links here you can you can you can you can check them out you can find more about uh our blockchain work in these links that are linked a couple of videos here for you to take a look at uh now coming to the meat of um uh the know hackathon so um uh we of course don't have a chain preference of course we love the ethereum ecosystem what it has done to the world especially to the world of uh developing open source digital public goods which is fantastic and that's why we are we are here so uh uh any evm compatible code is you know great feel free we are very agnostic we don't say you have to use this or that uh we basically do care about uh the use case so it's you know crucial for us that It ultimately helps solve a real world uh problem so in this haathon we want to just just focus on two of those areas uh that I showed you initially in that you know UNICEF page so one is climate change uh I think that's reasonably self-explanatory and the other one is injecting cryptocurrencies into the world of humanitarian and social Aid more specifically cash transfers so uh this may need a bit of an intro so I've linked a little blog here but please feel free to um Google um and then to understand what this means so so um uh agencies such as UNICEF uh for many years we have been uh sending uh cash U either in the form of physical cash or some sort of a bank transfer or maybe mobile money in Africa and and then so on to directly help uh people who really need it the most like for example right now large large uh part of uh our our programs um have been going to Ukraine uh I won't be surprised if if if you know Palestine gets gets you know included Ed now now as well and there are large scale programs in Afghanistan for example Yemen and so on so so far cryptocurrencies has not featured there but UNICEF does have a method to work with cryptocurrency so we are wondering what would it take to inject cryptocurrencies into this world so uh a platform maybe uh off ramping is a very very important topic uh because people still cannot uh buy uh a piece of bread using crypto in most of the countries that we know uh work with so as long as it is not illegal um and in fact there is good progress being made in uh regulation in whichever country that UNICEF is you know working in I think there is a chance to you know uh inject cryptocurrencies into this world and to get Aid their faster cheaper uh more transparent uh more open to our donors as well so that's like a that's like a whole sort of a background yeah so we have about $10,000 in prize money so 6,000 for most creative use of web 3 12 climate change and 4,000 for most novel solution for implementing cryptocurrencies in cash and voucher assistance um here are some examples of projects that we have done in the past uh for example uh we have supported a company who created an offramp but with no smartphone only through SMS uh so that it uh the world of crypto U more importantly to use crypto for remittances or maybe a universal basic income uh program or so on is now accessible to people uh even without internet U we supported a company working on a virtual bank of sorts for refugees uh where crossborder transfers was was much faster and cheaper refi protocol uh that connected funders with tree planters where each tree ultimately got its own nftd uh cash and vouer assistance platforms and then U uh a protocol which incentivizes citizens and business to take local climate positive actions in their area and then those actions are tagged in a GE nftd of of inos sort these are some examples uh so ideas for the hackathon uh by the way please feel free to do your own thing these are just thoughts from a few heads here you guys are super creative uh and we just want to be very open so please do not get limited by these by these uh ideas please be open uh very very happy to uh discover what you guys um come up with so the U criteria U for uh uh the hackathon itself how to judge it so first when when when it comes to the tech I mentioned we are protocol agnostic but but we do have a strong preference for code that do not have any dependencies on you know closed libraries or you know closed Source components we just want it to be open source all the way so this is something important important for us um of course this is a hackathon you just have a couple of days so even if you do use a close Source component because maybe you may not have time to learn uh another stack but at least if you know that this can be replaced by this open- Source alternative please mention that so that so that it it just becomes clear that ultimately this solution could be uh open source all the way so this is very important for us uh of course we work with the most vulnerable people uh in the world so it's very very important that uh that all of our Solutions does not do any harm and and one of it is uh any personally identifiable information name of somebody or or the address or phone number or whatever should not go on chain um so so that's very crucial to keep in mind or or anything else that could be construed as you know harmful um so so so this is U important to keep in mind when as as long as you're thinking of the code and then then Tech then of course the clarity of the of the MVP for a UNICEF use case so um I'll explain so um so it's not just from code completeness but also clearly articulated business case right but but UNICEF we are not a like a business like a for-profit so for us a business case means something else so so we look at scalability for example like like if can this solution be easily deployed in a 190 countries for example of course public blockchains are okay but maybe this has more to do with the web two part of your solution uh how easy easily scalable uh is it um digital inclusion so we work in areas uh with people U the most vulnerable where maybe there is very low internet availability or like no internet people may not have smartphones U and of course onboarding to web 3 U we know that It's Tricky is there a simpler way to onboard U it's are a more inclusive way to on board so these are all things to keep in mind which which we will appre iate a lot Financial inclusion uh is a solution meant for the unbanked or the know underbanked uh maybe the uh people with lowish literacy levels can use it or the design takes care of this in some other Innovative way so that's uh that's for you to uh think about I have linked a video here which shows uh one of our blockchain Solutions being piloted last year in Nepal uh for a cash and voucher assistance uh in an area which is prone to floods uh do take a look so while it is a blockchain solution this was a permission blockchain solution but still a high-tech solution um this video gives a good idea of of how they made it uh inclusive so so please do take a take a look the novelty of the idea uh we do not mean Tech novelty Alone um so this list that that I've shown shown you here these are all project that we have supported so if it's anything else which is not on that list that would be nice uh and any other idea that nobody has thought of will be fantastic so this also matters matters to to to us um that we uh that we don't just follow what the rest of the industry is do doing but we sort of lead in you know certain certain certain aspects including the novelty uh even Tech so uh because UNICEF can do things that traditional businesses can't do because we do work that that typical private sector do not do and we do it at scale so uh if there's a novel idea which fits a UNICEF business case or or something like that please we are like super happy to uh look at it and then give it a bit more weightage if you will U finally uh this is a this is an interesting one um I told you initially that we are uh very interested in digital public goods and we work very closely with know digital public goods Alliance in fact I think I linked it somewhere this one should yeah so so this is the website for the digital public goods Alliance uh you can take a look at the digital public goods standard couple of which I've already mentioned here for example um platform Independence where we don't use any closed loop or closed components I've mentioned uh little bit of do know har Etc but you do but you of course can uh uh sorry this one personally identifiable data but you but you but you can take a take a take a take a take a take a look at um the standard itself um to get some idea but this last point is about the registry so so so the DPG website has a DPG registry which has a list of um projects around the world which fulfill all the criteria of uh as mentioned in the DPG standard uh which has been vetted by the DPG Alliance which is not present here uh all of these projects have of course uh Pages which links to their uh repo so should be a repost somewhere uh let me see you take this one for example and this is about content okay at least there is a website uh this one also has a website and it is a repo okay so essentially there are links here which points to their code base and of course there is a full explanation of of what this uh project is about so so there are a list of projects here which you can filter by sdg so the idea here is can you build on top of or can you utilize the services provided by this current list of dpgs as mentioned in the DPG registry so if you're working on the know climate uh uh problem statement you can of course filter by that and there are other areas which could tie into uh including cryptocurrency in you know humanitarian Aid like ending poverty uh or you know something something around um uh h zero hunger also could could link to that I mean there there there could be interesting Solutions here so do take a look and and if you are able to build on top of this right or if if you can maybe extend the functionality of some of these dpgs or use their data in you know some way basically link to them um that will be very very cool uh because we do want this to become an ecosystem of its own um many of the those dpgs have nothing to do with web3 can web3 help them in some way so that's also an angle in which case of course I mean ultimately the link back to climate or the link back to uh Aid humanitarian or social protection Aid has to be made uh but but this is an interesting criteria uh for you guys you can you can take a look in the coming days and maybe uh prepare accordingly so uh that's about it I hope this gives a good overview uh would highly recommend reading through some of a links to um uh inform yourself of you know what what we do especially the Venture fund website and of course the website of the office of innovation and the DPG uh the know dpga uh uh uh website as well and yeah I wish you all the best and I really really really hope to uh discover some fantastic work and U and the best case scenario if if if that goes on to become a company that ultimately I would be able to work with you on a on a formal capacity through the UNICEF Venture fund uh thank you so much for your interest and I hope to meet you guys soon thank