foreign
[Music]
hello everybody
welcome to building blockchain products
for Unicef how to get involved
um my name is Shane O'Connor and I am an
innovation manager with unicef's office
of innovation which is based in
Stockholm in Sweden uh but I'm very
happy to be here at devcom with you guys
uh probably a lot of you know
UNICEF as an organization you know
you've heard of us you know what we do
maybe it's not so clear exactly why and
how we work with blockchain and
Technologies in general
so unicef's mandate is really to
advocate for children's rights and to
try and make sure that they achieve the
best outcomes
and make sure that their health
education protection
is is maximized across the world and
UNICEF operates
in about 190 countries around the world
but UNICEF also has an office of
innovation and within that office of
innovation we have a ventures team and
we have a a special team called Giga and
we'll be hearing from them in a little
while go to the next slide
so actually UNICEF has been working with
blockchain since are looking at
blockchain since about 2014 2015.
um and UNICEF is one of the larger un
organizations so big bureaucratic uh
sometimes slow to move so
um it takes us a long time to try and
get UNICEF to move
in this type of space and to get us up
to speed
on how to properly use the technology
that's out there in the real world to
support unicef's programming
um
uh in my own team that I work with the
Venture fund uh we have been providing
kind of seed funding to support what we
call Frontier Technology Solutions that
benefit children and the world and we
have some people from a few of the
companies that have benefited from that
here in the room today but really from
the slide there you'll see we're looking
at the intersection of the needs of one
billion people and 100 billion dollar
Industries so we look at AI
um drones 3D printing machine learning
and also blockchain and cryptocurrency
we've actually gone through three rounds
of blockchain funding cohorts
we did our first cohort in about 2018
which was more of a kind of a thematic
um call for submissions and you'll see
that we had
um submissions from Supply Chain
Solutions digital certificates and
badges impact investing we did a second
cohort back in 2020 which was more
focused on financial inclusion
um and and that kind of particular not
not so thematic but more focused
um
and some of the kind of products
platforms and companies that came into
that cohort were focused on humanitarian
cash transfers remittances and
decentralized decision-making tools
we have a cohort that is about to be
announced in the next one month or so
and this is some of the our third cohort
around blockchain
um and you can see some of the
um kind of solutions and companies that
have been involved there and uh yeah I
think we'll hopefully people can see
those coming out pretty soon excellent
uh this is really exciting and Asana is
going to be giving a talk later on at
about 5 40 on the uh the crypto phones I
won't take too much of a thunder here
but in 2019 uh UNICEF launched uh crypto
fund and we were in fact the first UN
agency to be able to receive hold and
disperse cryptocurrency so this is a a
big big thing for the UN and certainly a
big big thing for Unicef
and this has really been able to help us
to build digital Solutions and
particularly digital public goods to
help us ensure kind of Equitable access
to these Technologies and these tools to
really try and support human development
obviously through the lens of unicef's
focus unicef's mandate on supporting
children
foreign
one of the new applications again new
for Unicef new for un and using
blockchain is a cache based transfers
both kind of in a development context
supporting social protection schemes but
also uh possibly more interesting in
humanitarian situations so responding to
disasters trying to get funding funds
out to communities who've been affected
and we're actually at the moment looking
at blockchain for cash transfer where in
fact I don't know if they're here in the
room yet but we do have another cohort
graduate that is supporting us Room San
from Nepal but using blockchain for cash
transfer to really increase uh
transparency of these
um processes so
everyone can see the movement of the
funds all the way to the beneficiary and
this is interesting for us as a UN
agency but also particularly interesting
I think to donors too
and of course saving costs compared to
the traditional aspects for this
um this particular space
um
UNICEF is also looking currently we're
using blockchain to support the
um the cash transfer programming it's
not cryptocurrency at the moment it does
get converted to fias but we are
hopefully looking at
um using pure crypto uh cash trans cash
transfers early in 2023 I think that's
what we're looking at so my name is uh
Herman I lead the blockchain work for
Giga at UNICEF
um gigas kind of like operates as a
little startup within the office of
innovation at UNICEF
um we were started we started in 2019
um and we're sort of a joint venture
between UNICEF and the itu the
international telecommunications Union
and our goal is to connect all the world
schools to the Internet by the year
2030.
um so we have quite a lot of work to do
and we operate along sort of three
pillars of work the first pillar is
mapping uh believe it or not we actually
don't know where all the schools in the
world are so we're using machine
learning algorithms to
um analyze satellite data and identify
schools and actually help governments
find all the schools in their country uh
so that's always an interesting
conversation with the Ministry of
Education
um the second pillar is about financing
so we estimate that it's going to cost
approximately 428 billion dollars to
connect all the world schools to the
internet which is quite a lot of money
so we're really investigating uh
like Innovative financing models to find
sustainable ways to uh to make this
happen so there's two types of expenses
that uh we have to we have to solve for
the first one is obviously sort of
capital expenses you know putting fiber
in the ground uh
putting putting Towers up that sort of
thing but the second is you know once
you connect to school you have to pay
for ongoing internet connectivity you'll
sort of have subscriptions to that
that's kind of like how it works you
have to pay your bills otherwise you get
disconnected so we've got a team sort of
focusing on on making that happen
um and the third pillar is uh about
actually connecting so we uh operate a
team called the accelerate team where
um we work with governments to
investigate different kinds of business
models for different kinds of scenarios
you know schools in urban areas needs a
different solution than schools in super
rural areas so we work with governments
to try to figure that out and advise
them on sort of the best way to go
um so that they at some point can take
over the financing and the rollouts of
these programs and do it sustainably
so like I said uh we launched in 2019
our goal is to connect all the world
schools by 2030. uh so far we were
joined by 19 countries
um we have connected 5 300 schools we've
mapped about 1.1 million out of an
estimated 6.5 so there's still like
quite a lot of work to do
um and we were super happy to be joined
by 14 partners that support us including
Ericsson Dubai Keras musk Foundation uh
dell recently joined which is a really
big deal and we've raised about 210
million dollars uh towards this goal so
as you can see we're still quite far off
from the 428 billion required
um so I'm gonna talk also today a little
bit about some of the projects and the
products that we're developing at Giga
um so the first one is what we call gig
accounts which is like a accounting
platform and a sort of monitoring
platform
for the people who uh are actually
controlling the money to pay for a
school internet connectivity so the way
it usually uh happens is that
um a country government or a UNICEF
country office will write out a contract
for like 100 Schools or a thousand
schools in a country uh and have very
little tools to be able to actually
monitor whether this uh internet service
is delivered uh so what we're developing
is a way for them to make it super easy
to monitor that so we um we have our own
sort of real-time data uh application
that schools can install on their on
their networks and reports data back to
us so that
if data is subpar or connections get
disconnected
um we can actually hold uh internet
service providers accountable so that's
uh that's our thing and what we're
hoping to go with this is
um right now the tools really sort of to
support uh support these people in their
in their in their work but what will be
really cool is to actually connect this
with smart contracts and monitor where
the internet quality is delivered and if
it is automatically pay in 10 service
providers so that comes super easy for
people to uh to connect schools and to
to get paid for that
um the second product we're working on
is uh called connectivity credits it's
kind of
um kind of similar to the carbon credit
market so we're building a Global
Marketplace for uh connectivity
um
to make the connection of schools sort
of more Equitable so what's currently
the case in the free market is that
schools in rural areas get connected and
the ones in urban in urban areas don't
or if you're a school in the rainforest
an internet service provider isn't gonna
like lay a fiber optics cable there so
what we're doing is we're
um
providing a marketplace where we put
tokens on these difficult to connect
schools and allow internet service
providers to redeem these tokens for
benefits from the government like for
example tax breaks or special deals when
uh bidding for uh Spectrum uh bandwidth
and that sort of thing
so that's currently in progress in in
Botswana and we're looking for other
countries to uh to implement this
um another area that we're investigating
uh is nfts so we've launched uh in the
beginning of this year uh the first uh
first
the largest I could say the largest sort
of collection within the UN uh for this
called Patchwork kingdoms uh it's based
on all the school data that we have so
for these 1.1 million map schools that
we have uh we worked with the data uh
artist data analytics artist to create
these 1000 unique art pieces uh and
raise funds for Giga so uh we sold all
of them raised about 700 uh thousand US
dollars for that which is really cool
and
um looking to sort of build upon that uh
with our follow-up collection uh
currently
title in progress called nft2 uh
uh where we're basically uh looking to
build the world's most comprehensive
decentralized database of school data so
the idea will be to create an entity for
every single School in the world
um give this nft for uh to the schools
themselves to own and give them the
ability together with their communities
to edit the data for their school keep
it up to date and and own this data
themselves so
right now it's sort of on our Cloud
Server in Frankfurt uh sort of looked up
uh and for for us to use but it'd be
really cool if schools own their own
data so that's where we're hoping to go
with that so we're looking to use nfts
as a sort of a portal into into making
that happen
and the last uh projects that were uh
actually uh really Keen to talk about uh
at this event it's like we're finally
allowed to talk about this in public
which is really cool is a staking
experiment that we've been running uh in
Rwanda so
um we've been working uh with the
ethereum foundation and the the
government of Rwanda to create an impact
investing product uh using ethereum
staking to pay for school connectivity
so that's
um currently live and uh we'll also be
talking about that more in the panel
discussion on Thursday if people are
interested
I think that's it and then I'll hand
over ah there's one more so I mean Rome
wasn't built in a day uh and these
products aren't either uh we're still
you know iterating on these uh so we're
asking you guys uh do you want to help
us build
um
so
Antonio Gutierrez
um yeah mentioned us at the previous
sort of uh General Assembly so there's
really sort of been a global call now
for governments to step up and uh and
and help with this help with this course
to finish with the with the talk before
we go into breaking sessions is that we
we cannot do this alone we are
relatively or fairly small team compared
to all the things that we do and all the
products that we are building so we work
with companies with people on different
ways uh one one is that we have a tech
team an internal Tech Team of product
product managers that the scientists
software developers and we are
continuously sourcing for that so if you
are interested in joining our team keep
an eye in our website because you have
different jobs that go out there at the
moment we have one for a blockchain
developer that's open I think it's going
to be open for another week or so so if
yeah if either you're interested you
know anyone that might be interested
please just read the word there will be
another one for a blockchain product
manager Rod as well that will be coming
out soon and others will keep coming out
so definitely keep an eye on that and
and apply
we also especially for blockchain work
because many of the things that Urban
was presenting are so new and they are
experiments and prototypes that we are
building we work with external companies
and with vendors to to build them and
then we take them and we
scale them internally but we first work
with companies to to build them so again
if you are a company that's working in
the blockchain space either on the nft
space it's taking tokens and and others
and you are interested in working with
us there will be again few calls for
companies to apply to help us build the
things that Urban was presenting so
there will be a one call to help us
build this nft2 that doesn't have a name
yet so we'll be working with a company
too to build that at the same for the
accounting platform that he presented
kik account we have a working prototype
at the moment we'll again be looking for
a company to help us build the next
version of that and test it by auditing
a couple of countries so again if you
are in that space of smart contracts
Etc feel free to apply and then the last
one that will also shortly be coming out
it's on the connectivity credits we are
building that at the moment in Botswana
about looking to Pilot it in couple of
other countries so there will be another
call looking for companies to build that
a token Marketplace for for connectivity
and then uh yeah I think those are the
main goals that will be coming out of
course then we also work with companies
as partners so not so much
Contracting them but we work with
companies like that they must well
that's not a company or the mass
Foundation Ericsson IHS towers as
partners where these these companies
give in-kind contributions either
funding monetary but also sometimes they
give us tech support either through
their developers through their team so
again if you are interested in helping
out a reach out to us and then finally
the last one it's the Venture fund so if
you are a startup in the blockchain
space there are continuous course that
are coming out for that there will be
one that will go out soon around climate
Tech Solutions so if again you are
building something on that uh
20th of October it's coming out so so
again that will be out and it's an
investment of one hundred thousand
hundred thousand dollars more or less
uh with that I would also encourage you
to check this QR code so that you can
register like that you can also keep you
in the loop and if we have something
that we also think that might be
relevant to you we can keep you in our
Network and reach out to you