Blockchain, cryptocurrency, and Web3 innovations are enabling new products and services across the developing world. For example, the African crypto market increased by 1,200% between July 2020 and June 2021 led by high adoption rates in Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria and Tanzania. In addition, both Nigeria and Central African Republic have Central Bank digital currencies.
Donors are taking notice:
- Mercy Corps has $1.5 Million Blockchain and Crypto for Good Program Grants
- FCDO has £60,000 for Decentralized Web3 Solutions in Aid Programing
- UNICEF has $100,000 in Cryptocurrency for Blockchain Social Impact Solutions
We have to ask ourselves a key question: How can we leverage blockchain, cryptocurrency, and Web3 for digital development?
Explore Web3 Tech at GDDF Day 2
Today the Global Digital Development Forum continues with sessions that focus on emerging solutions centered around distributed ledger technologies. These sessions will help you understand when and how you can use these new tools to archive the SDGs and other aims.
- 13:00 GMT: Web3 Keynote Presentation & Panel Discussion: Explore how the emergence of web3, decentralized finance, and cryptocurrency economies could create powerful new models to transform economic development and unlock new tools for strengthening democracy.
- 14:00 GMT: Can a Crypto DAO Spur Climate Change Action? Can a Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) that used blockchain-based evaluations and cryptocurrencies impact climate change? Can we create this idea in 55 minutes or less? Join us to find out!
- 15:00 GMT: Blockchain. Emergent or Divergent? Learn about cryptocurrency, CDBCs, Stablecoins, and Blockchain FinTech, some of the most misunderstood technologies in the digital development sector, and how to use them in your development solutions.
Review Blockchain Ideas from Day 1
In case you missed it, the Global Digital Development Forum started exploring distributed ledger technologies yesterday. Be sure to catch up on these sessions (among others) to continue your voyage of discovery into this emerging solution area.
- Retail Central Bank Digital Currencies for Africa: a brief overview of global research in and experimentation with a retail CBDCs, detailing how factors in African countries should shape how central banks think about CBDC
- Blockchain for a Transparent and Reliable Humanitarian Response: Learn from an effort to increase the collaboration between NGOs and capture beneficiary duplications in Syria and Nigeria
Of course, we investigated more than these emerging technologies too. For example, Gabriel Krieshok’s excellent talk on Can Satellite Internet Impact the Digital Divide? or Carmen Strigel’s fascinating Tech Demo on Applying AI to Analyzing and Guide Classroom Practice. You can see those and more on the GDDF Platform now.
Sorry, but this comment will come off a bit blunt since I haven’t had time to read what other participants at GDDF are saying.
I’m a bit shocked to see that a big international conference like this has nothing critical to offer about – what many consider – to be simple hype and buzzwords.
Recently, Python’s founder Guido van Rossum stated: “Let web3 die in a flaming ball of fire”. Wouldn’t people be curious why some of the world’s most experienced technologists aren’t buying into the talk?
After years and years, we still have blockchain as an “emerging” technology, a hammer looking for a nail.
Let’s hear back from critical thinkers as to why there is such a big push to have cryptocurrency in impoverished and previously colonized economies? While countries governing most of the world’s foreign aid budgets are becoming more and more keen on regulation, some even banning cryptocurrencies as financial speculation and pyramid schemes, we are still seeing this push to have blockchain and cryptocurrencies in developmental projects.
Benjamin, your points are exactly why we are exploring these ideas at GDDF. Is Web3 relevant? Can blockchain help? Are cryptocurrencies beneficial? Those are open-ended questions that we’ll explore in this event. Join us to share your view.
I get what you’re saying, but can you point to the entry in the program that raise the questions that you just formulated? 🙂
The world is full of technologies that can solve the *actual* problems that we have, however what I find again and again and again is that we have endless talk anchored in the technology itself, not the problems. Advocates of blockchain, cryptocurrency and web3 look for problems to solve or actually outsource it – it’s most often other people (NGOs etc) that should help them find something to solve using the technology. Not surprisingly, everything we hear about blockchain is from a start-up, a good idea, a competition, a grant call, a blog post, a talk.. for years and years now. The amount of impact studies is very low, and the ones I’ve seen just conclude that blockchain was abandoned and never scaled [because it didn’t solve anything].
Why? Because we already have databases, we have distributed technologies, we have cryptographic signatures. They’ve been around for decades. NGOs have them, too.
Had I known about the lack of criticism in the program, I would happily have posted a lightning talk with the famous old flowchart “Do I need a blockchain => No” 🙂