Scaling blockchain solutions with the UN World Food Program and GBBC Giving

With rising inflation and energy prices, many people in the West have to buckle down and make difficult choices about where their household savings can be made. The USDA has projected that food prices will increase by 10 percent this year, although many of us will still be able to make good choices about the food we choose to put on the table for our families, even in these increasingly difficult times.

Many people in the world do not want food choices available to them in the way that we do. The world is facing the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. The number of acutely hungry people in the world has risen – from 135 million to 345 million people since 2019, according to the UN’s World Food Program (WFP). Acute hunger is a condition where people are marching towards starvation.

When Bernhard Kowatsch, head of the WFP Innovation Accelerator, found out that it only takes 80 cents a day to properly feed a child, it shocked him. He believed that if people could press a button on their smartphones to give 80 cents to feed a child, the solution to this problem could be accelerated, and the “ShareTheMeal” app was born.

“Big challenges can be tackled with innovation, not only in the commercial for-profit world, but in the not-for-profit world, where many of the big social challenges we face are even bigger than the big global business challenges,” says Kowatsch.

ShareTheMeal has 9 million app users worldwide and over 160 million meals have been shared so far. The app won “app of the year” in 2020 on both Apple and Android platforms. Apple CEO Tim Cook praised the “incredible passion, commitment and creativity” of the developer community and cited ShareTheMeal as an app that allows us to “support (…) those who need it most”.

Building Blocks, a new blockchain application coming out of the WFP Innovation Accelerator allows the transfer of tokenized money on the Ethereum blockchain to refugees to allow them to buy food at a local store, validating the transaction at the point of sale with an iris scan or other forms of digital authentication.

Says Kowatsch, “We modeled the WFP Innovation Accelerator on Silicon Valley accelerators, but for social impact. I believe innovation and technology can help solve many of the complex problems we face in society and is not just the sole domain of venture capital and business.”

The idea for the Blockchain solution Building Blocks was submitted to the Innovation Accelerator by a WFP finance officer who went on to attend the innovation boot camp and piloted the app with 100 people in Pakistan. The next pilot was with 10,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan who jumped to over 100,000 people in seven months.

Started with a $100,000 grant, the innovation is now used by more than one million people and has transferred more than $400 million, saving 98 percent in bank fees. These are the kind of scaling numbers most commercial tech players and their West Coast VCs dream of.

The suitability of the blockchain, a publicly available infrastructure shared by foundations and charities to make donations, is a good example. That it makes it possible for a refugee, in urgent need of food, to have an account unit available for redemption in a local shop, is nothing less than technologically elegant combined with a high degree of (social) utility.

WFP announced a joint initiative with the Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC) at the 2022 UN General Assembly in New York, which concluded last week. The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the Global Goals, were adopted by the UN in 2015 as a universal call to action to eradicate poverty, protect the planet and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity. Goal 2 is Zero Hunger, WFP’s mission.

The Delta initiative is aligned with this year’s UNGA theme: “A watershed moment: transformative solutions to interconnected challenges, to reflect the many interconnected problems we face today, including the war in Ukraine, the energy and cost of living crises, the COVID-19 pandemic and humanitarian disasters caused by climate change.”

GBBC Giving is a not-for-profit subsidiary of GBBC and is dedicated to “blockchain for good” and will support fundraising and education. The partnership is seeking to raise funds for WFP focusing first on a pilot targeting $100 million in fiat, crypto or in-kind donations, with a moonshot goal of $1 billion in funds raised if the pilot proves successful.

Sandra Ro, CEO of GBBC says: “We are enabling our corporate members and over 60 blockchain clubs and 100 academic institutions in our network to enable young budding social entrepreneurs, with innovative and creative web3 tools, to access open source -data from WFP. We hope to create greater and better awareness of the hunger crisis while generating new and innovative technological solutions to solve some problems.”

The corporate funding pledges GBBC Giving has already received are both numerous and significant and will help to start the pilot program with great speed. The pilot will start in January 2023 and will try to scale to the moonshot goal in October 2024.

“A $1 billion ‘food for crisis fund’ would have a significant impact with a theoretical $500 million dedicated to saving around 7.2 million of the most vulnerable people on the planet, and another $500 million dedicated to the Innovation Accelerator to drive the network effect of social media entrepreneurial startups focused on ending world hunger, says Ro.

Says Kowatsch, “There is not enough support for social entrepreneurs compared to commercial tech startups, and we set out to change the calculus here – There has never been a greater amount of funding available for social impact, and we intend to leverage that with our skills, experience and our track record of delivery at the WFP Accelerator.”

The world needs more of this kind of thinking, collaboration and especially doing. With governments seemingly inert to solving many of the social problems we face, especially while distracted from tackling the enormous global economic problems we all face, the deployment of private capital and donations into the hands of professional asset managers and technology innovators is a welcome step change to solve major societal problems, and there is much for all of us to learn from here and to applaud.