World

UNITED NATIONS — When Fredrik Mosis moved to Norway from Côte d’Ivoire as a teenager for football opportunities, he started to send money home to his family.


He channeled the money through his uncle, but when Mosis returned back to Côte d’Ivoire he found it had never reached his other family members.There is a solution for this common issue of remittance mismanagement, Mosis found, and the year-old, Norway-based blockchain initiative he co-founded, Vipicash, addresses it.


The app designates how and where individual cash recipients can spend their money, tying the funds to participating local businesses or institutions.“It’s the same issue that we see people facing, and it’s the same issue within Africa as well,” Mosis said. “You don’t know how the money is being spent.”


See more Devex coverage of blockchain technology:► Has global development reached 'peak blockchain hype?'► Q&A: How blockchain can combat migrant worker abuse► Could blockchain help put Europe's 'invisible' children on the map?► Opinion: Here's what needs to happen to scale blockchain in developing countries



Real-time demonstrations of Vipicash and nearly 10 other programs centered on blockchain — a decentralized, secure online database — were on display yesterday at UN Women’s headquarters in New York. Some of the programs launched as recently as two weeks ago.


The simulation experience also served as an “innovative procurement process,” which could help UN Women identify a service provider they want to work with in humanitarian settings, explained Caroline Rusten, chief of the organization’s humanitarian unit.


Most of the programs focused on providing, and storing, a digital identity for users, and facilitating money transfers outside of traditional set-ups with individual bank accounts. Attending U.N. staff, academics and other experts peppered the developers with questions about how their services could work in settings without broad mobile or internet access, and the accuracy of facial recognition technology.


Blockchain remains on the verge of breaking into humanitarian work, Rusten said. She offered Devex three points about how the technology could influence international humanitarian engagement.

More transparency could mobilize private funding

Many of the program simulations on Tuesday stressed the concept of empowering people off-the-grid — who may not have state-issued forms of identification, or bank accounts — with protected access to their data, which they can unlock with facial or fingerprint recognition.


The idea can also be translated for use by funders, to ensure they have more oversight over how their donations are spent — deciding, for example, to send money just for solar energy, directly to middle-aged women in a remote area of Papua New Guinea, as can happen with the multi-use IDBox.


That could mean strengthening ties with skeptical donors, Rusten said.“Private funders who might hesitate to give money to the U.N. or the U.N. system, but they may still want to provide if they can ... channel funds directly to beneficiaries,” she explained.


“Private funders can come in and use the blockchain technology to support families directly, for example. In the future it could be a way ... to mobilize private funding in a different way.”Donors could then follow the transfer of their money to see who has received it, and how they have spent it.


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“We believe that you would then be better able to maybe mobilize private funding so they can see, they can also see the transfer of money through the chain link,” Rusten said.

The focus, for now, is on cash and identities

Traditional financing options don't seem to always speak to the women and girls UN Women and other partners are working with, Rusten said.“With blockchain we would be able to find better solutions for how to transfer money, or a better solution for how to work with identity. These are the sort of solutions that we have been focusing on at this event,” she said.  


One vendor at the event, the Norwegian-based Blockbonds, showcased an app that requires a central partnership with a banking system within the country. But it also allows individual users to generate digital currency and save money through a payment system on the blockchain. By paying in cash at local, participating businesses, users would then, instead of change, be receiving a “top up” on the app in return.


Several stressed the question of protecting people’s identities through facial recognition, which could help in identifying people who are missing, or have been trafficked. This could also aid refugees and other vulnerable populations, such as migrants, in establishing and maintaining identities, Rusten explained, easing their way to access medical care or employment.


“If we can work again with populations to identify ways to use technology to help them build up identities when they're on the move, and also to recognize that a lot of these people come from countries that maybe don't have a functioning state, or maybe they don't want to give them papers that they need,” that could be a huge benefit, Rusten said.“We think that's really important when it comes to identity.”

Blockchain is new at the U.N. — but it likely isn’t going away

UN Women launched a blockchain initiative about a year ago, marking the start of a discussion on new ways to do humanitarian work, Rusten said.In July, it partnered with Innovation Norway to host its first hackathon in Oslo on addressing challenges for refugees and displaced people.And blockchain solutions continue to pop up in association with the U.N., which participated in the first humanitarian blockchain forum at Fordham University in New York in the fall.


“For us it's been really important in trying to find better solutions to target girls because we know they are disproportionately affected by crisis, but we [the aid community] are not good enough at targeting them,” Rusten said.UN Women will continue to work to identify blockchain solutions that could be implemented in the field, Rusten said.

About the author

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  Amy Lieberman is the New York Correspondent for Devex. She covers the United Nations and reports on global development and politics. Amy previously worked as a freelance reporter, covering the environment, human rights, immigration, and health across the U.S. and in more than 10 countries, including Colombia, Mexico, Nepal, and Cambodia. Her coverage has appeared in the Guardian, the Atlantic, Slate, and the Los Angeles Times. A native New Yorker, Amy received her master’s degree in politics and government from Columbia’s School of Journalism.

Amy Liebermanamylieberman

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Quartz India


The Narendra Modi government is looking to oust cryptocurrenciesfrom India but has a lot of affection for blockchain. The distributed ledger technology is becoming a hot favourite in Asia’s third-largest economy for solidifying information, alerting all stakeholders, and preventing tampering.


So much so that, in his budget speech on Feb. 01, finance minister Arun Jaitley announced plans to adopt blockchain technology.


“The government will explore use of blockchain technology proactively for ushering in the digital economy,” Jaitley said.Most commonly known as the technology underpinning the likes of bitcoin and Ether (of Ethereum-fame), blockchain is a digitised and decentralised public ledger of all cryptocurrency transactions.


Stripping away the financial application, blockchain is essentially a bookkeeping platform that can be accessed by anybody on the internet but is owned by nobody.“Once you have a blockchain, the big spreadsheet in the cloud serves as a record-keeping system that can’t be forged and can’t be reversed,” said Nicolas Cary, the co-founder and president of Blockchain (the company, not the technology).

Eager governments

Blockchain technology is already making waves in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.The government there is working with Swedish startup ChromaWay to set up a blockchain-based land registry system that allows people to collateralise property, get loans, and invest against that asset.


 Tracking property ownership using blockchain allows people to circumvent disputes, frauds, and errors, while also lessening the administrative hassle of registrations and title transfers.


Registries around the world are currently logged in one of three ways: on paper, in a database as signed-pdfs, or as digital files in machine-readable form. The final state is where most land registries ultimately hope to end up, August Botsford, Chromaway’s chief security analyst, told Quartz. “It’s more efficient, and you can do more with your data, including analytics and automation,” he said.


“If one views the process of moving land titling and registration to blockchain as a better and more future-proof way of achieving (the third option), then the price is very comparable with other large scale IT migrations.”Andhra Pradesh’s neighbour, Telangana, too, is digitising its property documentation system.


Beyond land registries, blockchain can also put an end to other fraud like identity theft. To reduce the chances of getting hacked, a growing concern in India, the web-based platform can manage digital IDs. “Currently, if you sign up or pay for something on the internet, you turn over unencrypted personal info that gets stored all over internet…creating a honeypot that attracts attackers to breach that service,” Cary said.


With blockchain, only encrypted, relevant information will be released whenever necessary. A step ahead of other states in implementing the technology for land registries, Andhra Pradesh also entered into a partnership with cybersecurity firm WISekey, making it a frontrunner in securing citizen’s data as well.


Recently, the Maharashtra government called upon industry leaders, researchers, and others to devise ways of incorporating blockchain in e-governance operations. “The government is one of the biggest data creators and data consumers.


Blockchain will bring in more efficiency, transparency, accountability, and accessibility in data flows,” the state’s chief minister, Devendra Fadnavis, said at the Maharashtra Technology Summit (MTech) on Jan. 17.Amid all the talks of curbing cryptocurrencies, India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India, still believes that blockchain technology is ripe for adoption.


Banks in India are already relying on blockchain to enable overseas transactions, international remittances, and other processes.The spread of blockchain use in the private sector use of in industries like insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, among others, could also lessen significant burdens that befall the government.


“Capitalising on the block chain technology could open new ways of securing peer-to-peer lending transactions, boosting trade finance, fintech and information repository sectors,” said Sapan Gupta, the national practice head of banking and finance at law firm Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas.


“By segregating the use of block chain from crypto-currencies reflects the government’s intention to use the technology in a gradual and safer manner, before it gets into concepts like replacing currencies.”

Positive side-effects

Using blockchain to monitor supply chains means the journey of a good can be tracked from sourcing to their sale by collecting information in the secured cloud-based ledger.


For instance, in the food and retail industry, shipments can be tracked and digitally recorded via a blockchain in real time. “This can save lives in the event of an outbreak of food-borne illness,” Daniele Bianchi, an assistant professor of finance at Warwick Business School, said.


“This is obviously helpful both for consumers and the government. Especially in emerging economies whereby the supply chain is typically not easy to track.”Just like identity theft becomes harder, meddling with critical digital assets—like patient consent records in the healthcare sector or insurance payouts—also becomes less of a concern since no single authority can modify the records.


At Bajaj Finserv, the holding company of Bajaj Group’s non-banking financial company (NBFC) and insurance firms, blockchain technology is being used to simplify travel insurance claims. If a flight is delayed, that information comes to the system and the claim amount is automatically generated and paid without the customer having to even file a claim.


There are currently over 40 Indian startups working on blockchain technologies in various industries like finance, healthcare, cybersecurity, and logistics, according to Sangeeta Devni, a programme manager at the IT industry trade body NASSCOM’s 10,000 startups initiative. But real-world applications are still few.

Still learning

After interviewing early adopters, both on the customer side and vendor side, consultancy firm Deloitte recognised a slew of deterrents to using blockchain technology (pdf) that exist in the Indian market. From a lack of awareness to a dearth of trustworthy vendor partners to cybersecurity concerns, various challenges persist.


“The main danger comes from hacking, that is, the innovation of the blockchain brings new type of attacks which are far less understood and much less mitigated as those occurring in conventional database management architectures,” Bianchi warned.


Such concerns notwithstanding, the Indian government seems rather bullish on blockchain.
Read next: Arun Jaitley has just killed India’s cryptocurrency party
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