Impact Summit 💥 The UNICEF CryptoFund

[Music] hi cartic thank you so much for having me here and a very very very big congratulations to all the finalist of uh the hackathon so well I I I'm going to get started with just why I'm here in in the first place so my name is s b I work with UNICEF office of innovation I specifically work with a team which is called unicef's Venture fund we are a VC within the UN agency um and very often we're asked why we do what we do and why we're here so as you all know half the world is not connected to the internet um we we work in in a world in a reality where there are a large number of digital Solutions which are being created um and yet many don't have access to these Solutions and even when they do have access to these solutions they these Solutions may not be designed necessarily to solve or uh consider their unique realities or their unique situations um and it's exciting to see and hear from your Solutions because that's the way forward and that's the way to see uh how we have local solutions from all over the world addressing challenges that are that are being faced um globally and so at the UNICEF office of innovation we see ourselves uh positioned to work um at a global scale uh but be able to leverage hundred billion doll industries that have the potential to impact a large number of lives now what we mean by that is how can we as a un organization agency be able to leverage Frontier Technologies such as blockchain uh and cryptocurrency drones AI machine learning data science along with other uh Frontier Technologies to be able to create a radical change for children so how can technology uh help us do what we want to do but do it better do it faster and solve challenges that um are facing children but also you UNICEF as an organization and how can we move faster in what we want to do and so at UNICEF uh we launched a venture f fund which is a $35 million pooled funding vehicle this fund essentially is designed to invest in open source Frontier Tech Solutions which are based in developing nations or emerging markets and our focus is of course as I mentioned on looking at Technologies and solutions that are far from core programming when I mean core programming I mean solutions that are already tested and we know they already work so what we want to invest in is solutions that are are not already um available in the market or that are a little bit on the early early side so that we're preparing them and growing them to become sustainable platforms uh so we're a $35 million fund and we also hold 8 Bitcoin 2,527 e uh and that's uh and that's sort of what brings us here which is not just our investment in blockchain Solutions but also our ability and capacity to access hold and disperse cryptocurrency so what makes UNICEF unique and what makes the UNICEF ventor fund different from another VC is of course our focus on building technologists and entrepreneurs to drive Capital Financial Resources Innovative Financial models to markets that don't see enough of such funding we exclusively and only invest in open source Solutions so when I say that we believe that open source sources more scalable more adaptable and that's that's smart business we also have a very strong focus on Smart investing um by smart investing we meant and launched it as a strategy to invest in female lead and founded companies and we're proud to say today that 43% of our portfolio is female letter founded and we're working very hard to strengthen these numbers to reach a balance 50% but beyond that we have had now the smart investing initiative has been around for a few years and we have been challenged to expand the definition of what we mean by smart investing so we now not only want to invest in female Founders we want to expand our definition of gender to look at lgbtq communities to also have investments in Founders that are persons who identify as persons with disabilities to look at age um and really be able to strengthen what we we mean and what we uh hold ourselves accountable to as our key performance indicators uh when we talk about smart investing and last but not the least of course there's the crypto fund and I'll come to that in in in just a few minutes at the Venture fund we make investments in startups in two stages uh they're two ticket sizes you can apply to the fund for $100,000 in funding uh which is for seed funding now companies which are eligible um for the seed funding have received funding from The Venture fund at the seed stage um but are showcasing promising results do have the option and the ability to get additional funding from us and get growth funding anywhere between $200,000 to $400,000 and we provide this growth funding for one of two purposes the first being um we see the dies solutions could expand their product offerings and then the second one is to conduct deployments to really be able to scale Pilots that you've developed at the seat stage now this funding doesn't come alone um we have a very extensive technical mentorship program it looks like just two words in the slide but we actually have seven different thematic areas uh and streams of technical assistance which includes of course working very closely with our blockchain team our in-house team of front-end and backend developers we have open- Source mentors also mentors for impact measurement data privacy trust diversity Equity inclusion um and most importantly impact measurement so that's the complete package and it's not a standard one-size fits-all incubation program it's a very personalized one where we try to understand the particular needs of a solution and then try to provide support to address uh challenges that you may be facing in scaling your solutions to date we we've made 146 Investments so these Investments are of course as you can see in Emerging Markets um I mentioned we have a big range of Investments also in female Founders and we invest of course across thematic areas so we have a large uh range of thematic uh Focus areas that we invest in which of course align very well with uh the sustainable development goals we have Solutions in Education Health uh job matching and you know decent work and Economic Opportunity and also a large number of our investments are actually in Industry Innovation and infrastructure and you'll see what I mean by that in just a minute um so on the programmatic side we have Solutions such as this is an AI solution actually um it's um it's a solution that helps improve children's cognitive skills it's an adaptive learning AI model um and it's based in Mexico this solution of course Very Much aligned with education is actually we invested in them in 2018 the company is now uh scaling its solution across the Latin American continent um and have signed actually a contract with the government of Guatemala to scale their solution to 1.5 million children um they've developed two games actually with UNICEF one is called toi which is the cognitive skills they've developed a second one which is on math skills um but what's more interesting and when I was saying on innovation in Industry um is the key sort of infrastructure solutions that we invest in and I think a lot of blockchain solutions really fit that lens this is a solution from India it's called Uh stat wig we invest in this company also actually in at the end of 2018 um and we invested in them to help us track vaccines all the away from manufacturers to hospitals and consumers um they provide end to endend tracking um and this solution is being used and actually is now being used even by UNICEF in different country offices um for vaccines but the same solution has also been used by the government of India for tracking rice bags so rice bags from Farmers to government distribution centers and what that does is really showcases how blockchain technology can be used for multiple purposes as it's the underlying lay um that can be cross- sectoral uh and help address a a large number of problems across uh different areas now the Venture fund of course as I as I mentioned was launched in 2014 um we have been around for a while so we are able to now talk about what results look like as seed stage companies we don't always see these results and it takes a us a while to be able to reach a point where we can talk about beneficiaries um but we are now able to say that these seed stage companies over the years have been able to grow sustain themselves and scale uh and as of today we have 41.5 million beneficiaries across six se sectors we've also seen that 56 UNICEF country offices so UNICEF is a big organization it's working for children it's present in a 59 program countries by by program countries here I of course mean Emerging Markets um so we have a large number of offices and we're seeing clear Pathways of scale for blockchain solutions to be picked by these country offices to solve challenges that they're facing on a day-to-day basis our companies have also been successful in raising followon funding so they've actually been able to generate 2.6x the funding that we've made in these companies so we're really seeing um the fund being catalytic in driving financing to markets that don't usually see such funding um and we're also excited to share that 64% of the portfolio is generating revenue and 40% of companies are actually profitable at the moments another another U sort of pathway that we're seeing emerge for the fund is that a large number not a large but at least seven uh companies from the portfolio which is about 8% of our portfolio have actually been acquired or have successfully exited uh and this ranges anywhere between 6 million to 74 million it's a wide range but we're really seeing uh a big sort of uh push in these Solutions being open source um but being scalable and being uh sort of acquired ired in and growing into much bigger Solutions uh you know in in their Journeys so as I mentioned the the the 56 country offices that are using our Solutions I'm just going to maybe share a couple examples here so one exam and and these are on purpose not blockchain related because we have a few of those coming up uh but here I'd like to share there's one particular example which is actually a chatbot Builder that we had invested in in Brazil um and the chatbot code the chatbot Builder code because it was created as an open- Source tool is actually supporting now just by themselves they're actually supporting 35 different country offices for various different chatbots that UNICEF requires uh caters to in different markets Deo is an example of a solution which is a chatbot Builder which is for Early Childhood uh development for parents so it helps them and provides them on advice um for looking after children they actually also support a large number of other chat Bots there's one on menstruation there's one on just violence online violence uh there's also one on Online safety so there's a large number of use cases another example here is that of cloudline and here is a joone that I'm talking about which um cloudline is a company based in South Africa they've actually created a Airship and this Airship is being used to deliver medical supplies in remote areas and they're actually conducting Pilots with um a couple of Unicef country offices in some cases to develop breast milk in some cases to develop vaccines uh or life- saving supplies and now coming to more uh of the interesting part on our blockchain exploration so blockchain I I don't expect you to have a look at this whole slide with all the sort of info here the reason I'm actually sharing this is because um we want we we want to share that at UNICEF we've actually been exploring and experimenting with blockchain use cases since 2015 uh we started on very early um we were conducting a lot of internal prototyping we had our blockchain team back then as well um and has only grown over time we started of course cautiously and slowly to understand the technology to build our own knowledge and capacity to understand the tech and see how we can leverage it for Unicef we then started making investments in Solutions through the Venture Fund in blockchain Solutions later in 2019 we actually launched the first crypto fund um and then and since then we've been exploring new and different use cases so on just uh the different cohorts that we've invested in we've exclusively invested in three specific blockchain cohorts um but we also have invested as part of other cohorts say for instance on climate or on um you know on education and health we've also invested in some blockchain solutions but three specific ones we had on blockchain the first one was more around digital certification supply chain that's where stat wig came from uh transparent funding and impact investing the second one was exclusively on financial inclusion um which was looking at remittances humanitarian cash transfers something that we're still extremely interested in and looking to grow our Solutions and our offerings in um and most recently we've actually invested in a cohort on digital inclusion this one's really looking at automated payments um improving Financial flows generating transparency and leveraging smart contracts for financial uh for payment of automated payments for resources that are being provided especially in UNICEF context I would like to also share that the fintech cohort was actually has actually been one of the most successful and fastest growing uh portfolios that we've had at the ventor fund across technology area um and I think that's really representative and reflective of where the blockchain industry and blockchain ecosystem is at we saw within the 12-month period of investment the portfolio was actually able to generate 4 $4 million in followon funding within that year we had one company that was acquired which was Leaf Global fintech we also had different sort of portfolio collaborations where companies were working together again a very very strong reflection of the blockchain ecosystem um we had actually the very first uh company to give back to the fund um and of course had over 700,000 beneficiaries reached in that year so here's a snapshot of some of the companies um you'll see we had one which is BX smartlabs from Mexico which is actually decentralized saving circles very basic concept on chain making it so much more efficient uh and transparent um kotani P actually they they recently uh raised $2 million uh they're company based in Kenya uh an onramp off-ramp for crypto doing exceedingly well and really uh a leader of the cohort in of of of this cohort in many ways another one that we find super exciting um and is also the one that actually gave back to the fund there's a slide on that is EXC capit um they're actually a gamified savings platform um I'll come to how they actually did the return to the fund um and then there's roomssan rooms sun is particularly interesting for us because as I mentioned they're working on the digital cash and voucher assistance management system um and here you'll see is an example they graduated from the fund back in 20122 and they actually were contracted uh in response to the floods in Nepal to provide cash transfer assistance and support uh in collaboration with the with the Nepali government and the UNICEF country office to essentially use onchain tokenized transfers so that they can make sure that they're reaching a large number of beneficiaries in a much faster and quicker uh time time period and so they were actually able to reach 1900 hous households which was over 10,000 beneficiaries and included over I believe 2,000 children and the the the main sort of success of this use case was that they were able to bring down the transaction time which normally takes a few days to 28 seconds and for us that was a really sort of powerful uh representation of what we can do with blockchain technology oh here are the stats um so you can see um the women impacted reaching unbanked beneficiaries reach they also actually integrated um with different sort of systems uh to ensure they could reach beneficiaries using um SMS they actually also integrated with an ivr system uh which is an integrated voice response system so that for those who are unable to read um are not literate they were able to reach them as well uh by sharing uh voice voice messages so that they could understand how to use the token how do they redeem it where do they go how do they actually uh get cash and get the cash transfer in in their hands this is uh this is actually the the return that I was talking about um xcap at the company from Argentina they actually did an nft sale um and while the the value was was was you know little I think what was very important for us was the concept of having a venture fund investe find a new way of giving back to the fund so the Venture fund actually does not take Equity uh if I didn't say that before uh we act we see our return on investment as the open- source IP that's generated during the investment period um so for us to see a venture fund inves see the value in the fund and then sort of give back to the fund with was actually a really um incredible sort of uh Milestone we then in 2022 invested in the digital inclusion cohort um and this cohort I think really helps us sort of move away and look Beyond even um reaching the unbanked um populations into seeing how we can do business and do it faster uh and do it more transparently across our systems and so so we have convexity which is from Nigeria they've developed chats which is again a digital vou cash and voucher assistance platform we also have Weare which is from the Democratic Republic of Congo they're actually looking at seeing how they can direct remittances towards Healthcare on chain a pretty interesting use case but also a a pretty complex one um considering you know the different intermediaries involved as well as regulations and then we have xmesh and invest tools they're actually uh working very closely to see how we can incentivize internet service providers using uh blockchain technology and using the benefits of blockchain Technology uh in different ways to improve and enhance connectivity in remote areas so so really helping us drive our forward in you know really really unique ways I also wanted to bring here just to show you an example of what it would mean to not just be a part of a blockchain cohort so we've just invested in a cohort of climate uh climate action companies as we call them um there are eight companies from eight countries but two of the eight are actually blockchain Solutions so I've brought them in here um one of them is zlabs they from Trinidad and Tobago and they're essentially developing a community token U which is backed uh or essentially to reward positive actions or climate positive actions but what they're also doing is uh testing use cases for GE nfds both very interesting for Unicef and for us to see how we can leverage again for our programmatic purposes and the second one is esus Farms from Uganda and they're building a they're they're actually um experimenting with a parametric Insurance use case to see how they could have a blockchain based Insurance platform uh to provide automated insurance for small holder farmers at the time of a climate disaster so again it's a very interesting way for us to see how we as an organization can push blockchain Technology Solutions uh to be used for very core programmatic areas at UNICEF and with that is a little bit adjustment on the slide but uh coming to just our crypto fund we launched the crypto Fund in 2019 with the purpose U of being able to leverage not just the efficiency and transparency um of cryptocurrencies but really to be able to see how we can tap into uh new resources how we can use crypto for programmatic purposes as you see in the in the in the blockchain tokenized aid assistance but also we're keen to look at uh you know blockchain sorry crypto crypto Aid assistance Solutions as well um but more importantly and something that's the most important for us when we launched the crypto fund was really to be able to see how we as UNICEF can build unicef's institutional muscle memory in operating in a digital future or a digitally financed future and so that's been something that's super important uh to us at the crypto fund and at the Venture fund um we've of course been able to you know not surprising to this audience I'm sure uh be able to leverage 100% on the transparency show show to um our donors how we moving our funding we require companies to spend their investment in crypto as well um so providing end to endend transparency on the flow of crypto um and coming just towards the end I'd like to uh really call out uh the opportunity that we've had for our startups and in essentially leveraging Innovative Financial models we had a gitcoin round for quadratic funding for 10 of our companies so 10 companies were that were actually registered as certified open- Source Solutions uh participated with us and with gitcoin in a quadratic funding round and we were we actually put out a 50 e matching pool uh and were able to leverage 15,500 individual contributions raising an additional 67.5 eth and close to 15,000 die in this pilot that we conducted together um I already spoke with you on just uh cash transfers but the reason we're particularly interested in exploring uh Crypt based transfers is of course looking at visibility the visibility the end to end visibility it provides us reducing the time significantly as I told you just even tokenizing it brought the time down to 28 seconds and lastly the cost by eliminating and subtracting intermediaries um from our cash transfer programs we're really able to also benefit uh on the cost side and with that I just want to put out a call to action we are always Keen to work with blockchain developers to work with the ecosystem and the community we are always looking at technical collaborations um on our crypto and cash trans work we're looking at staking and other Innovative Financial modeling opportunities um and most importantly also on our smart contract auditing capabilities and at the Venture fund you always have the opportunity to be able to apply to an open call for funding we do provide the $100,000 in both cryptocurrency and Fiat so at any point in time please feel free if you do have a solution that is connected to children or can impact the lives of children in a positive way to apply to us uh with your solution and with that I we are done for everything related to the crypto fund you can go to our website which is UNICEF ventor fund.

org in case you're Keen to learn more about our programming you can also go to our crypto fund um which is Crypt fund. unicef. to actually see the movement of funds to see the solutions we've invested in um and also to be able to cheack the endtoend um movement of uh all of the crypto we've received so far