Aligning blockchain solutions with the United Nations World Food Program and GBBC giving

With rising inflation and energy costs, many people in the West are having to make difficult choices about where to put their household savings. The USDA estimates that food prices will increase by 10 percent this year, although many of us can still make good choices about the food we choose to put on the table for our families, even in these tough times.

Many people in the world do not have food choices available to them in the way that we do. The world is facing its worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. According to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), the number of acutely hungry people in the world has increased from 135 million to 345 million. Acute famine is a situation where people are marching towards starvation.

WFP’s Head of Innovation Accelerator, Bernhard Kowatsch, was shocked to learn that it only takes 80 cents a day to feed a child properly. If people could tap 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 solved with innovation not only in the commercial for-profit world, but in the non-profit world, the big social challenges we face are bigger than the global business challenges,” he says. Kovatsch

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 developer community’s “incredible passion, dedication and creativity” 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, will allow refugees to buy food in a local store with tokenized money on the Ethereum blockchain, verifying the transaction with an iris scan at the point of sale. or other forms of digital authentication.

Kowatsch says, “We modeled WFP’s innovation accelerator on Silicon Valley accelerators, but for social impact. I believe that innovation and technology can help solve many of the complex problems we face in society, and not just venture capital and business.

The idea for a building blocks blockchain solution was presented to the Innovation Accelerator by WFP’s Finance Officer who attended an Innovation Bootcamp and piloted the application with 100 people in Pakistan. The next pilot was 10,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan, jumping to more than 100,000 people in seven months.

Started with $100,000 in funding, the initiative is now used by more than a million people and has transferred over $400 million, saving 98 percent of bank fees. These are the benchmark numbers most commercial tech plays and West Coast VCs dream about.

Blockchain’s suitability as a publicly accessible infrastructure for making donations to foundations and charities has significant advantages. A unit of account for a refugee, in urgent need of food, to be redeemed at a local store, combined with technological beauty and superior (social) utility is nothing.

WFP announced its joint launch with the Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC) at the 2022 UN General Assembly in New York, which concluded last week. The 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the Global Goals, were adopted by the United Nations in 2010. In 2015, it was presented as a global call to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all peoples have peace and prosperity by 2030. Goal 2 Zero Hunger, is WFPs mission.

The joint initiative is aligned with this year’s UNGA theme: “Watershed Times: Transformative Solutions to Interwoven Challenges, the many interconnected issues we face today including the war in Ukraine, the energy and cost-of-living crises, the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change and humanitarian disasters.”

GBBC Giving is a non-profit subsidiary of GBBC and is dedicated to “Blockchain for Good” and supports fundraising and education. The partnership will initially seek to raise $100 million for WFP, focusing on a pilot targeting fiat, crypto, or leveraged funds.

GBBC CEO Sandra Roe said: “By enabling our corporate members in our network and more than 60 blockchain clubs and 100 academic institutions, we are enabling young emerging social entrepreneurs to access the open source information provided by innovative and innovative Web3 tools. WFP hopes to create more and better understanding of the hunger crisis while creating new and innovative technological solutions to help solve some of these problems.

The corporate funding pledges GBBC has already received are numerous and significant and will help kick-start the pilot program. The pilot will begin in January 2023 and aim to deliver to the lunar fort target by October 2024.

$500 million to save the planet’s 7.2 million most vulnerable people and another $500 million to drive the social network impact of innovation accelerators, a $1 billion “food for crisis fund” will have a big impact. “Entrepreneurial startups are focused on eliminating world hunger,” says Roe.

Kowatsch says, “There’s not enough support for social entrepreneurs compared to business tech startups, and we’re gearing up to change the calculus here—there’s not as much funding for social impact, and we intend to take advantage of it. Our skills, experience and track record of delivery at WFP Accelerator.

The world needs this kind of thinking, cooperation and especially action. Especially as governments seem focused on tackling the massive global economic challenges we all face, leveraging and contributing private capital is a good move in the hands of professional wealth managers and technology innovators. There is much to be learned and applauded from this shift towards solving larger societal problems.