Blockchain from the Bottom Up by Nick Williams, Sandra Uwantege Hart (Devcon5)

[Applause] hi everyone come in and take a seat welcome to watching from the bottom up we're going to introduce to you some lessons from creating financial empowerment in remote Pacific island communities using a real-life use case that's still ongoing now my name is Sandra when taking her I work for Oxfam it's a global nonprofit present in over 90 countries I am the Pacific passion livelihood sleep so for the past ten years I've been working in disaster preparedness and response and I manage the portfolio of programs across the Pacific region that are designed to deliver payments to people affected by natural disasters the mine is nucleus on the converse a clay sample is a tax cut that really focuses on creating financial inclusion fundamentally these are the number of reduce to use spaces good loan we're going to be looking at today is how to get cash to horrible people in crises so together we've managed to run the world's first cryptocurrency enabled cash based assistance program using Oxfam's experienced field presence and community reach and of course the ingenuity of several dozen so that's not like to start with an anecdote so when we were working better larger plastic banknotes had been introduced relatively recently and people are really excited about that and they tell us the best thing about these new plastic banknotes was that you could bury them in the ground for longer without them washing because for me it was really the first time that the concept of being unpacked shifted from this model the academic concept to something that was actual very tangible too often watching projects looking at financial inclusion really take quite a superficial approach believing that technology can be just injected into communities that everything will be magically better and we reckon that this has left much bizzy's discourse around what change or financial inclusion and saw disconnected from the realities that people experience on grant so here today as a community at DEFCON we believe that we absolutely cannot in good faith plan to be solving some of the world's biggest challenges without working with and in communities blockchain has from the beginning been promising financial inclusion open payment systems for underserved communities and marginalized people but in order to do this we need to actively reach out to those communities and get there and rather than just gain in spaces like this so this is fun Lenten also if I'm active but not to is a collection of 83 islands in the South Pacific Ocean it is a country that is extremely remote so don't be afraid if you have never heard of it before but a lot too is with all these islands extremely dispersed it's very sparsely developed and in fact most people and their islands do not live close to a bank in fact banks are often not even on the same land mass as there another fact is that most of these people live closer to the volcano than they do to obey so there are actually more people who are volcano in funnel active event people who are banked even Vanuatu also it's a question of urgency when watch was the world's most disaster country it sits directly on the Ring of Fire it's in the middle of the Pacific cyclone corridor it sits on the front lines of climate change and as such this use case has been invented invented within an existing disaster preparedness program so let's talk about cash anyway what do it why would we want to give cash instead of in the conveyed such as food or clothing and the reason we want to do this is because collectively wreck ready to terrible of working out what what will be will need during the process so same thing is in Syrian refugees have actually sold behind they've been given to fly what they actually need so it makes a lot more sense does give you cash instead to have that more prices good mom business getting disabled attached to people it's a thorough manner is really really hard this series have enjoyed shooting thoughts of cash up the river because they're less likely to be ambushed when they're going to rob dried up on the right here's the most minute approaches we're moving into practice if you just let people buy what you they even the stores you can just three versus stores instead these things instead of need to find ways to get physical cash to hundreds and hundreds of individuals instead you only need to find a way to get into a handful of stores and this is often a lot easier because stores can have a higher level of financial inclusion than individuals you need a way to track how much each vendor is going on so we give it to become each lender a contactless paper which looks like that all this to say what's render this is it's really really inclusive it means that we can help me power anyone with us about how they are quite a lot so this card is tied to an ethereal watch which means that we can track the credit spends in here where we can take this sip see someone step burn that I'll make it more resilient by not just track the credit but instead actually use staying quiet picked the local currency a measure of transferring parts since things that vendors actually have real value that arrives in their hands every time they accept the payment it's more than just a constant assembler that will repay them this is screebl that means that the end of end or start have to allow us to repay them they can find another provider dissolving their stabl plan to sell it by the same points off even say who does end up doing a lot of green payments this is fundamentally changes the structure of what we're doing we're no longer just a end-to-end payment provider actually now two things we have a lot and an exchange and this is really important because it changes the regulatory structure in which we operate these things that are far more flexible for us to operate in the otherwise really difficult countries like Lebanon Organa lodging so this is a very tangible advantage of using a blockchain over existing processes and so the qualifiers it's 96 percent faster than what we would do or what Martin is doing in the past this is because I'm able to bypass a huge chunk of that existing banking system so again what does blockchain do for us me speaking as an NGO for me what this does is it starts to break some of the chains that are consistently constraining the way the big UN agencies NGOs foundations and other nonprofits operate when you use a crypto enable payment system what you're doing is you're creating more nervousness around the way that money is traced in the way that money is donated what this means is that you're opening up that humanitarian system to include new actors and in our case smaller vendors it also means that that corner business allows us to deliver by and with local vendors across and between multiple locations at once because as we know the world's earthquakes the world cyclones the world's volcanoes absolutely do not care about wars they do not discriminate according to which country you're located in or which country you've targeted your donations do so in addition to improving efficiency and automation it takes what are unnecessarily complex and slow systems of big agencies and it makes them much more simple much more intuitive and much easier for local micro economic stakeholders to use now our system our humanitarian system today is also unnecessarily hierarchical and I'll even say that it is still very colonial in the way that people decide who should get what and who is making those decisions this results in monopolies of control and privilege and power and concentrations of donations when in fact in reality communities are always the first responders but they are almost never the main responders but now using these types of systems building in communities and with them we can start to focus on enabling small economic stakeholders to play an active process so they then become active agents of recovery as opposed to being passive recipients or beneficiaries of humanitarian assistance so this sounds great theory that meant stuff talked about the realities of immigrant we actually develop because there's no platform work out of a Syrian refugee camp in northern templates level that's it here we plan to walk it to take these parts using everything seems simple enough this is exactly what we all use on a regular basis without camp cards when we got there we found that there was an existing cash aid program been run using debit cards also using the instrument effects so fundamentally we release in our system what we found is that people would rather in something that they pass the start of it and the cost of the vendor blue chamber even targeting for this is exactly what we saw for very obvious reasons it's not by real things now because they're just Arabic numbers so it takes us into the impression that we're working with the concept that's really really universal but for people with lower literacy who were not so used to these so-called Arabic numerals it's pretty much of a impossible concept obtained by taking a memorizer to illustrate the supply here's what actual Arabic numerals look like so even though the numbers that you and I use on an everyday basis especially based on this number set try to remember in some of you guys really really really hard so this is where we need to start to check our assumptions and revisit them and really challenge with why do you think we are to decide on behalf of someone else and to speak and replace their voice in the process the reality is that the way that the global financial system and its payment instruments function does not apply to many many people in developing countries in fact it doesn't relate to them sometimes it's not even there people don't have debit cards there's no bank there's no way to pay and sometimes those payment systems are there but they simply don't work or they're too expensive so how do you resolve the security issue we explored many many service presidents like symbols will come as waste medicine all right easy right and above but ultimately the community that logic suggested something really really signal to us just to display the name on the bigglersport cell device turning hands and check it now this seems trivial so why is it so effective so the reason this works is because it mimics the way that transactions are actually secured in these communities especially at the micro level so speaking at the village level it's actually very very difficult to use somebody else's car or take somebody else's belongings without either the vendor or somebody else around eventually saying that is not you or that is not him that's not his or that is not hers those systems of accountability are in place for somebody who wants to steal something eventually they're going to meet a relative of the person that extraordinary so case in point in final art we've done nationwide feasibility studies to actually assess if payment systems as a mode of response is possible and in so doing we consulted with some of these vault with small vendors that we work with now and what they do is they do regularly lend money to people just on the basis of knowing their names they're lending money to people on the basis of knowing their customers so the seats of the vendors at the community level are actually doing kyc and they're able to cross check and verify that information in leveraging their relationships with people in the communities around them now block to you as it's currently designed is opera is really optimized for trustless environments and I think we need to interrogate this a little bit because in my world where I live where I work where many of the billions of the world live and work financial security is far more of enhancing existing social frameworks of trusts so really relying on those that you can trust as opposed to operating in trustless vacuum so this isn't to say that blockchain doesn't help what we have is a secure framework that can enable social models of trust to flourish and to expand by accelerating the exchange of value amongst in-between people at the community level but at the same eliminating the capacity of those people to be able to abuse each other's trust now what this means is that we can start to bridge the gap between local and international miles of Commerce by using systems that are adapted to the way people behave communities are more decentralized than what we're used to dealing with but it's not always in the ways that we would expect sir in Japan and a number that I'd like to the reality is that if you want to live in a country you need to imply a loss with the regulatory expectations for the authorities there cynnwys knows this the hard way Wibbly had to be Memphis for us like that's his blood who live it up we're trying to push those batteries too far and ultimately our actions don't just affect our company but also the end users who unlike us don't have the privileges that's getting out of the country and leading so this is consequences that have really really eek impressionists yeah knowing who is sitting or seeking funds is a deplorable of a lot of these institutions of the thirties path you need to assume that a person sending money or a city money isn't part of the duracell for instance now this is noting is largely a process of collecting multiple identity documents from saga and in cross-gender what we've been learning I've been allowed to exact this whole thing breaks down pretty quickly if people spell their names differently on every single piece of documentation dates of birth often tended to differ by months for 18 years this isn't something the various what conceal identities it's just a nature of emerging markets hopefully though and these are the content of document based on actually doesn't really work for a lot of the world and it also means that this neat little diagram I showed you stable quite a big centrifuge people is unfortunately really much illegal same ones a bar to liquid there's a couple police we match against to work harder instead we can use stable points as collateral to meetcha to your token or larger conversion from this token back to a liquid stable point there's only possible if you're past pale icy chips and your addresses on employment contract Wireless if you don't look like this you can access down there a lot Adaline clever however you could still spend experience these things that my conducting ayc checks on vendors we're still able to distribution individuals who would otherwise be off limits this is a process where one form of value has different levels of liquidity to different people and may even seem to the coronium implementation is something that we prepared all off without watching and this is a sister pretty interesting conclusion that doesn't need to be the enemy of financial compliance but rather it can be a tool developed help me to an increase financial inclusion so the takeaway for you guys is that trust is not always in institution in places where those institutions don't exist without infrastructure is not there in fact Trust is actually in each other it sounds common sense it sounds very human let me give another example of this happening so in the Solomon Islands I had a discussion with the telephone that was launching mobile money one of the test groups had a guy who received money into his mobile wallet on his phone and he immediately went to the cash out agent and he said to the cash out agent to cash out my full balance right here right now on the table the cash out agent hashed it out no problems and this man killed it his money vilified them and then gave it back and said okay thank you I'd like you to put it back inside now he just wanted to check that that money was real he wanted to check face to face with somebody that he knew that that money was real because he just did not believe that it could be on his phone so this is where we can make some magic right so when you have a tech startup life cycle that's able to code that's able to iterate on the ground within the community and do this on the fly plus an organization like Oxfam or a civil society group that is embedded in the community that has an unprecedented level of access that's able to amplify those community voices and encourage participation through translation and communication you can create something entirely new so this is the last one so this is where we can work in harmony and literally build out the front end beyond the existing infrastructure and even beyond the digital infrastructure that front end needs to end within the community and that needs to be done through that level of community engagement and Gunsan very very birth so this is where we need to start blending advanced technologies with the knowledge and techniques of people that are used to communicating with communities and this is also where we can start to create feedback loops that are mutually beneficial so what you have tech that is enabling reach and allowing you to build beyond where the infrastructure does not go that tech can create efficiencies and transparency but when you have community representation community presence community voices and connections then what you're doing is you're ensuring that that tech is being enriched through iterative development that it remains inclusive and that eventually it's becoming more robust so what have we been doing what have I been doing I've been acting as a translator this is how we include the voices of the many and in fact we have encoded those voices in the way that this application has been constructed these are people who are on the fringes of digital infrastructure these are people who do not have digital access who are not digitally literate but yet there's evidence of the application has been built and therefore as easy to easier to use and this is also what makes unlocked cache extremely distinctive so similar development level working across several countries Greece little erotica analogic consider the camera and one thing that want is that even the wrong pants is so much diversity right now in Australia 94% of payments made using a contactless bank card while 2014 more money was transferred by mobile phone in sub-saharan Africa then Europe or North America come together meanwhile engine had like come in the times I've seen so many plans the point is is that all we need to virtually different a need to be treated as such and the thing is decentralization does not necessarily guarantee diversity what change may happen sexualizes computer code but the decision were made on these layers already suggests so much about what the extrait user experience on top of this will be the rates of inflation of the currency how come other keys are stored and the legal legal implications of our designs if we're not careful we're easy to client will organize the way people interact with clients and the process that we construct our world doesn't necessarily translate continued stay home breach this Financial Inclusion devil rather than extending it in the scheme of things many of the systems that you and I work with on a day to day basis they won't listen hey I hope you on a legal past born and went through this likely bizarre experiences with direct money using my credit card but it worked but for me where I live and work this is not the case for many emerging economies for many markets in the global south this is not the case but in some ways bloodshed is actually suited to those communities than it is to those of us who have the infrastructure working just fine for us as we pay and as we travel this is a solution now that has grown out of one of the world's most remote communities this is happening right now and we absolutely intend to extend this both as partners but also with these communities in order to enable one community's experience to grow and develop and improve the next humanitarian response but also to inform the next community that's going to engage with the tech we believe that the nature of blockchain development should be inclusive not exclusive the system of delivering humanitarian assistance is absolutely no exception to this rule and so the final takeaway here is if we can do this in a place like run water then there is absolutely zero excuse for those who are at this conference and elsewhere are working on blockchain to not engage with communities and go that extra mile thank you [Applause]