 You could. That's why we started talking later on here. All right, so I'm going to, I think, welcome everyone. I'm going to kick it off. So good morning to everyone in the Americas. Good afternoon to everyone joining from Europe and Africa. And good evening to those in Asia Pacific. I'm Julian Gordon. I'm the VP for Asia Pacific for hyper ledger. The open source blockchain initiative at the Linux foundation. And I'm delighted to be here to introduce this webinar on the important and urgent subject of how blockchain can build a more resilient, effective future for the humanitarian sector. Firstly, I'd like to thank hyper ledger member BSN with whom we are collaborating to bring you this webinar today. We have an amazing panel with us today, an expert lineup of leaders in the humanitarian sector, all exploring how blockchain can benefit this area, which many say urgently needs to build efficiency and trust, reduce costs, streamline supply chains and so much more as increasing threats such as pandemics, climate change and natural disasters require aid dispersed faster, more widely and more efficiently. So sit back and get ready to listen to this discussion of issues facing the humanitarian sector, how blockchain can help and how you can get involved. If you have questions during the webinar, please use the Q&A function in the Zoom chat to submit them. We'll gather questions during the discussion, then we're going to have a Q&A at the end. And with that, I'd like to hand over to our exceptional panel to introduce themselves and their role in this area. And we're going to go in alphabetical order. So I'm going to ask you first, Lucia, please to introduce yourself. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. It's morning for me calling in from DC. I like to describe what I do, I suppose, as being in the business of democratization. My company is an agency that operates at the, I guess, where international development and emerging technology meet with the goal of democratizing the benefits and access to frontier technology like blockchain. And outside of my company's work, I dedicate myself to democratizing who gets to build this technology, spending a lot of time launching initiatives that involve training or re-skilling populations in emerging markets or supporting female founders. So I'm really happy to be here. Very excited to have this conversation and to see Rick and Matt again. Thank you, Lucia. That's great. And Matthew, I think you're next. Hi, everybody. I'm Matthew Davy. I'm the Chief Strategy Officer at Kiva. So for those who don't know Kiva is kind of a multinational nonprofit. We operate in 94 countries around the world doing microfinance. So we tend to go into areas where financial institutions have not served individuals and find ways to encourage or help them go and serve those individuals, whether that's through, you know, very, very cheap, very risk tolerant capital, whether that's through technical assistance or whether that's through other programmatic work. I also oversee in my strategy role all of our efforts in emerging technology. We look at the digitization of the last mile as kind of a generational opportunity to help include a lot of people who have been financially and otherwise socially excluded. And if we don't have people in the humanitarian sector actually out at the tip of the spear kind of pushing these efforts, I have a lot of concern that will just codify and ossify the systems we have today that have kept these people outside the perimeter. And again, I like to talk about finance because Kiva's about financial inclusion, but the same goes for healthcare education. You can go down your lawn and realize the things that are kind of at the safety net level. There are a lot of people outside the perimeter of those. So super excited to be here. A lot of our work does in the technology group center around blockchain because of its ability to operate in these contexts in a very decentralized manner. And I'll get into more of that later. Okay. Thank you, Matthew. We're looking forward to that. And finally, Rick. Thank you very much, Julian. And hello everybody. Thanks for joining us. Also a special thanks to BSN and the hyper ledger for sponsoring these sort of discussions and getting these topics out there and giving us all a chance to get together and have these conversations. My name is Rick Shriebs. I serve as the chief strategy officer for a for profit company called aid tech. And aid tech is a, I want to call it a startup. We just closed our series A though in reality, the company's been around since about 2015. And since at the intersection of digital ID, digital payments and blockchain power transparency. Aid tech was one of the early movers in donation transparency with the Irish Red Cross and also has done a number of other projects around the world, including having the very first baby on the blockchain with the blockchain powered birth registry in Tanzania. Prior to joining aid tech, I served five years as the director of emerging technology at the international NGO Mercy Corps where I helped lead their blockchain and digital currency initiatives. And also together with Matthew have worked on the Libra now DM project. Wow. Great buyers, all of you, right? What a great experiences, right? And I think we're going to have a great conversation today. So I'm going to start really maybe to set the scene where we are today and maybe firstly define what we mean by the humanitarian sector. So I don't know any of you, but maybe Rick, you could maybe talk about what do we mean by the humanitarian sector for people maybe not aware? What kind of scope would that be? I think generally when that term is used, the assumption is that we're talking about the various nonprofit organizations that are dedicated to trying to provide assistance either in the wake of disaster, emergency relief assistance, or by building resilience and vulnerable communities to help insulate them from disaster. Of course, there's a large number of non-governmental actors in there as well, not purely nonprofits. There's a number of for-profit organizations that are focused on the sector and a number of governmental and multi-governmental organizations that also work on this. The fundamental issue is the amount of people in need continues to increase and the amount of resources available for helping them continues to decrease. And that gap is someplace where emerging technologies are able to fill that hole and provide us with a way to leverage those scarce resources to help more people. So I think any organization that's focused on that problem really would be what we would or at least I would consider to be the humanitarian sector. Okay, excellent. So what is that? So for those kind of organizations, what are the key kind of challenges today facing those kind of organizations, maybe Lucira or Matthew? We're happy to jump in. I think I would say, I mean, there's a list of a thousand different problems, but I would boil it down to probably like infrastructural inefficiencies and then a very big barrier around trust that I think has been eroded over the series of years. And then I would add something, you know, along the lines of what Rick is saying that we are seeing an increasing amount of issues, people at risk. We are, you know, living through things like a pandemic, which makes more populations a lot more vulnerable. We're seeing change in climate, which is worsening situations for various populations around the world. So I think worsening world context plus these like infrastructural inefficiencies that have resulted from, you know, decades of building very fragmented approaches to solving a problem. There's been a lot of, you know, similar organizations doing similar work, but not working together or not building systems that are able to integrate together. And the inefficiency of using these systems with, you know, bootstrap resources that doesn't update them fast enough. And so they may have data or they might have, you know, an approach or an intent to use data to solve some of these problems, to learn a few lessons that would solve the problems more effectively, but an inability to really develop the infrastructure that would allow for that to take place. And then I think the trust one is just, you know, both transparency and also just the way that resources have been managed over time. I think the erosion across is probably something that we need to keep at the forefront when designing these kinds of interventions that the three of us seem to work on. And then, and then thinking through the ways in which the technology can enable more trust, more transparency, more visibility into the ways that these interventions are done. And maybe I can definitely add on to that, you know, following on the technology and the infrastructure and the systems, like one of the challenges for the humanitarian sector is really trying to do no harm. And that leads to the humanitarian sector tending to lag when it comes to technology. So when interventions could be much more efficient, could be much faster, could leverage modern technology. It's easy to point a finger and say, yeah, well, you're using 2011, you know, systems for a 2021 problem. And I don't want to fault the humanitarian sector for this because when mistakes are made for a lot of us who are on this webinar, it's a nuisance. It might cost us some money to restore. It might be a nuisance to go and find how to get access to your account or you didn't get your social protection payment and you can go and have a grievance and you're not going to go bankrupt. Your family's not going to go hungry because of that. You can't let those problems happen in the humanitarian sector. Those things can actually be very devastating to individuals and populations. And so I think one of the biggest challenges is how is the humanitarian sector? Can we figure out how to leapfrog faster? How to, we want to experiment with blockchain. How do we experiment more quickly? How do we get it so that we can actually roll out to larger scale populations with these interventions, as opposed to only doing these small control trials. And by the time we move on to say, okay, we now know causation, correlation, like what's going to happen when we do these things. Now let's roll the population. Well, that crisis is over. And I think that that's why you see a lot of humanitarian agencies do really well in crisis intervention, but not well in crisis prevention because it's hard to catch up. I don't know if that makes sense. Better technology has come around. And so by then the technology has already created. And especially at this rate of innovation, right? Yeah. I mean I've been places in Sub-Saharan Africa where they have all of these smart chip cards that have now just spoiled sitting in warehouses because they didn't print them fast enough. Like they were going to get them, there's going to be election that we're going to do a pan West African identity card and like an EU type identification card. And the countries didn't get aligned fast enough to get it done. And they spoiled literally like the chips on them went bad sitting in a human warehouse. These are the types of things like have to figure out how to not have those things happen because that was wasted many millions of dollars in a gigantic effort on that. And that's just one case that happens every day. Okay. So how does blockchain or how could blockchain, you think, be deployed in the humanitarian sector to help these issues? I think we talked about trust. We talked about the challenges of intervention, right? So maybe Rick. Sure. Happy to talk about it. There's a couple of things that I'd highlight here and certainly both of the other panelists have really some good insights on this. So I won't monopolize the entire topic, but I think the first and most obvious thing is, is the use of digital currencies, right? Which is a blockchain power technology or distributed ledger power technology to be more accurate about that. And the use of digital currencies in cash transfer programings in the receipt of donations in the tracking of donations, giving you the transparency layer as well is super interesting and has the potential to do a couple of things for the sector. First and foremost, it should be able to allow us to deliver that cash based aid more cheaply and more quickly. It should also give us a better audit trail for the movement of those funds and help us decrease fraud. So it should give us better visibility on the movement of those funds, which is oftentimes a very big issue with the NGOs. And additionally from the front end side, from the donation side of things, it gives us a way that a donor can actually track the movement of those funds. Now some NGOs have been reluctant to go down that path, not because they're up to anything dodgy, but simply because it's really a complete revision of the way that they handle the flow of monies coming in and going out of the agency. So what we talk about there really is the potential of this technology to realize that big change, finding major NGOs who are willing to swap over their operations and modify the way that they do things is quite a challenge. There are some startup NGOs that are looking to disrupt the sector that are doing some very challenging things in this space. And I think that the jury is still out on whether the big NGOs are going to react to that, or whether the smaller NGOs are going to wind up disrupting the sector as a whole. So there are a number of other things that blockchain can do, more traditional things such as supply chain management, et cetera. But I'm going to stop there because I know the other panelists have things to say about this. Yeah, I mean, I think you laid a good beach head there right on it. And I think, you know, there's examples of humanitarian sector and NGOs and multinationals experimenting with this technology. One I like to use as a world food program has something called building blocks that they're using to actually partially for cash transfer, but you can also then give someone a QR code via blockchain that can be used to redeem for a sack of rice. So it's not just for money. It can be for any type of thing that there's supply chain of money or supply chain of food or other goods. And I think it's really important in the humanitarian sector how blockchain, again, and we talk about the potential of it because there's a lot of things that can be used to help people. And I think one of the stuff is that massive scale in the sector, which can be a little frustrating to those of us who see these pilots in action and then see all of the damage being done by not rolling this out to larger scale. But just to make the example, with refugees, they're currently a citizen of no country. So when you try to think about whether it's your rice you're trying to get to them, whether it's money you're trying to get to them, the traditional systems don't work. And this is where blockchain is really interesting because blockchain you can say, you know, you're going to have a very complex system of dollar, you know, social protection payment at this address. And then there's a system to let someone access that address and redeem it without me having to have them open a bank account, have an ID card, a whole lot of other things. If you play that out at scale, you could build very efficient systems where all the way at the donor level you have visibility like this was supposed to go to Matthew and it actually got to Matthew. And Matthew's spouse did not take the money. They did not take the money. They did not take the money. They did not take the money. They did not take the money. They did not take the money. They did not take the money. And then all the intermediaries, you know, a UN agency would be very reluctant to give full audit to anybody over their databases because of the type of sensitive information that's in there. So there's a lot of potential there, but I think where Rick was starting, all this stuff is at such an early level. So I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. So please expand this program. I think that the other thing, the other component of the technology that we have to be talking about more is the smart contract component, right? Specifically because of the power that it has to enable these kinds of really fragmented ecosystems to come together in limited ways that allow for collaboration to actually take place without necessarily opening up your network. I think the migration and refugee resettlement example is great because essentially you're dealing with a population that isn't citizen, but that receives services from literally, you know, hundreds, thousands of different agencies, organizations on the ground, community-led initiatives, the UN, UNHCR specifically or, you know, the World Food Program, et cetera. So you're talking about this like huge ecosystem all trying to help the same population in different ways. And then we have a redundancy of data. We have a lack of transparency of how it is even flowing through all of this and how, you know, function is even flowing through all of this because, you know, redundancy of data is a big thing and it's a vulnerability for people if you are collecting, you know, for one database and then you're recollecting for another database and who knows how that one is secured. So when I'm thinking about its main layers of, yes, absolutely, the lender and payments and, you know, this ability to trace not just the value that we think of immediately, which is money, but also the value in other forms, such as identification, such as food goods, such as a health care services, et cetera. But then on top of that, building the right mechanisms to automate the workflow within which we distribute all of the services and all of this aid that is tied with traceability. So I think building the ecosystem that allows for function and for collaboration is one of those things that is something we can start working on at larger scale because of the ability to sort of automate these workflows and to connect some of these ecosystems in ways that they hadn't been able to do before. So I think the real starting point for us has been to identify these places where multiple organizations are willing to cross, you know, or use some aspect and then build a little bit of enablement through smart contracts there and then work our way into more depth of collaboration over time to build the trust that is necessary to be able to do that. Okay, that's excellent, right? So yeah, we've covered a lot of things there, right? Supply chain, some cryptocurrency. We talked about smart contracts. We talked about, you know, many, many things. You know, we're starting, right? It sounds like it's very nascent and early days, right? So, but do any of you have specifics of what you've done in your organizations any more specifics about what you've done with blockchain in your organizations? So... Yeah, I can, I mean, quickly, you know, Kiva has been working with decentralized identity using blockchain using hyperledger tech. Hi, I'm here with all the hyperledger folks. But you know, one of the big problems is the ability of individuals to identify themselves. So we've actually found that blockchain systems can be very effective in vulnerable areas. So Sierra Leone, as an example, 5 million adults, 7 million, 7.5 million total population of the adults, 18% have a bank account of some kind, even a basic savings account. And when you start digging that back, one of the primary reasons for that is lack of their ability to identify themselves open an account. So we've actually been building on top and now there's a national digital identity platform in Sierra Leone, that any individual, any adult in Sierra Leone can use with just a thumbprint to go and authenticate and remotely pull down their credentials. And what's neat about this system is kind of the consumer protections that you can build in the blockchain that this individual, like I can't go even as an employee of Kiva helping Sierra Leone as we've stood up the system, I wouldn't be able to go in and access their data. The only way it can unlock is through them sovereignly putting it in their account and it shows a consent. Here's what you're going to share. And at that point it unlocks and shares it. And so what's really interesting is being able to get not only a solution in the field, but a very resilient solution for those individuals. So we're using it in that and that's kind of a beachhead for us then to be able to start add on more financial products and services like how do we build an ecosystem where then it's easier and we can encourage more banks to open bank accounts for these individuals to make it easier for them to send and receive remittances and receive services. So that's our example. Okay, and I think we're going to go a little bit more into self sovereign identity later, right? More into the under the bonnet of what's happening there. Lucie or Rick, any other ones that you want to add? Sure, I mean, we've been using it in also different ways, some in the identification space as well and more geared toward resettlement and rescaling for potential employment. So a lot around, you know, what is the type of data that we even need to collect in order to enable a domino effect of benefits. So is it okay we don't need certain types of data because the goal is really to get them resettled and then to destroy sort of the data that we've ever collected because it's served its function. So really working through the way to design systems and piloting these systems in the Mexican American border with the undocumented immigration crisis that happened that has been happening for the past couple of years and then successfully sort of being able to support the resettlement of about 3,500 in our pilot in order to scatter throughout Mexico with a job offer already in place so that they could start working immediately. So it was really like a functional based identification that had a limited place in the world but it was really just to get from point A to point B which was to have status recognize status in Mexico and to be able to have a job offer so the flip side of that is this notion of more permanence in profiles so some of the work that we've been doing in Africa along the border of the DRC has been to help farmers sort of officially map out land that they had already distributed and organized themselves so a big philosophy at least in my company and I know that both Rick and Matthew by-by is sort of like we don't need to come in and do stuff sometime it's already been done the community has been living in that area for a while they have their own and just because it's not official in a document or it's not recognized by a government agency that doesn't mean that they don't have a way of operating and so they were being successfully farming food and they had distributed how that was going to work and so all we did was come in and sort of support their mapping process and build a sort of like a land claim system that now the Ministry of Agriculture in both countries that are sort of relevant to that border are using to determine who's growing what where so those are some examples of the stuff we've done with blockchain that's very interesting so there's informal system already set in place so you came and helped formalize that through technology and there's obviously always a very big danger when it comes to assets like land where you know if you do come in with surveyors and there's a lot of opportunity for corruption there's a lot of opportunity for like titling or redrawing lines and borders which we were very mindful of and so it was really just like mapping out what they specifically already had arranged and I think that that's probably why we were so happy with the outcome of the system because it was inherently non-invasive and it was really just providing the technology for what they already have organized for years. That's excellent a lot of people I know actually I think Brian always says that that's one of the reasons he came in for that use case right to help protect people through the land rights so that's a great case sorry Rick. Yeah no problem. Yeah from the ATEC perspective I mean the company's been around for five years plus and across that time has done a number of different trials and use cases around the world save the children, red cross women's world banking or all clients I'm just going to highlight one here because it dovetails nicely with the presence of Hyperledger which is the transparency engine project which is powered by Hyperledger Fabric and the transparency engine combines digital ID and digital payments into a mobile app that allows the distribution of aid quickly and with good traceability in a variety of different contexts and that's been deployed in several places around the world. Now one other thing I wanted to mention and I wanted to mention this one because Lucia had raised smart contracts it's not actually an ATEC project but I think it's one of the more interesting things that's happened in the sector recently and it comes from the Danish Red Cross it was the creation of a catastrophe bond tied to volcanic events that automatically releases the funds when an oracle verifies that a volcano has occurred so it is actually an insurance policy or a relief policy if you will because it isn't actually directly for the people impacted that is triggered by smart contracts linked to an oracle so the funds are already set aside they're already earmarked for the event if it occurs when that event occurs the funds are released immediately so instead of the usual days, weeks, sometimes even months before aid actually gets into the hands of the local agencies who can provide relief to people this sort of blockchain powered system can get that relief to them while the event is still happening which is just sort of the holy grail on the emergency relief side of things being able to pre-position aid so that you're able to help people and get it to them ASAP because it's that pain period between the event and when the aid arrives but so many bad things happen in these places with the vulnerable population so just a hat tip to Danish Red Cross and that work it's some of the most forward thinking work in the sector that employs this particular technology and I did want to raise that with the group I think that's a great and awesome case study right and that's really that's linking with the insurance sector as well so that's other sectors helping helping the humanitarian sector right so some prepare to take the risk activity and then that being happening immediately without all the paperwork so yeah that's a some great examples all three of you right so what is what is the is missing now what's the kind of next step what can we do in the future what's the next kind of solutions are you looking at what other kind of use cases do you see in the humanitarian thank you I'm happy to try to narrow down specifically to blockchain I think that five years ago and three years ago and even a year and a half ago there were a lot of places where you saw a solution looking for a problem where it's like people saying I have a blockchain team how do I blockchain this thing that I'm working on and I think as we started to see these pilots and I love Rick by the way that Danish Red Cross example is amazing and we've talked about that before I think now people are realizing what the unique characteristics of blockchain are and how they might actually unlock better resilience better disaster response you know better protections for individuals so when I look forward and say like how do I see blockchain coming more to the humanitarian sector I think it's actually saying this problem that I've had for a long time that I've been putting duct tape and band-aids on there actually is a really really good solution for that you know the CEO you mentioned land registries there's lots of these developing countries where there's four formal land registries and none of them are accurate and the actually accurate ones the informal one where you can go to a village and they all know who owns which plot. Blockchain is really well suited to that because you could take each of those individuals again they're kind of trust in a trustless environment you can let them all become issuers of credentials they're each issuing their own credentials that gives you an audit trail that then you can say now look now I can see every claim and you can go back to the analog days of like you know an individual walks under a refugee camp with no identification how do you figure out their name you get 15 people they walk down to the camp with at the same time and say on three all of you jump and say this person's name and 13 of the 15 say Matthew and two of them say Mike and they say congratulations your name is now Matthew and it's most likely correct unless they were all colluding to trick what your name is you can do the same thing with the property rights you're going to have five six seven eight probably six of the eight claims will line up and it'll be pretty clear who actually owns that property. So I think you know those types of use cases we're going to see oh the trustless and trustless environment the trust in a trustless environment the multi issuer the interoperability the ability of like I have a birth certificate but not a national ID or I have a national ID but not a birth certificate the ability to take these multiple participants and not force them to come to an agreement let them all participate in the system and then you can figure out what the which source of truth you want to know. Again same as the example I use like I could pull out a gym card that might say Matt my driver's license and passport that say Matthew and you know a dining rewards card that might say just M for my first initial and all of those are valid and they don't have to care about each other so you can see a lot of a lot of that where there's these like systems that have a hard time working together that blockchain will allow them to work together I hope we see a lot of that and I hope we see it in the future. Okay actually just take a step back one thing we discussed actually about crisis is do you do you see do you think we've learned anything from the crisis we're having today COVID-19 and has that made any any impact on the kind of work that NGOs are doing maybe Lissia would you be able to care. Also I'm still thinking about Matt because I really appreciate it and also yes that was exactly the process used for what we did in that we found a DRC. There's a like a reputational component that I think comes into play that is really important and I think the same thing sort of happened with the pandemic it was you know we were stressed it was a stress test for the entire world which we utterly failed and I think the openness within which the pandemic has sort of forced on to a lot of organizations government agencies and ministries that now are like well you know we are the healthcare ministry we were completely out of our depth and so many people within our population suffered like we need to come to a reckoning here and figure out how we're going to do this better and more effectively and so I think one of the things that I think was actually a potential opportunity or I don't want to call it a positive because it really it came at the expense of so many people but inherently like organizations or ministries that I had seen more cautious or more closed-minded about the potential of the technology sort of say okay well maybe I need to just understand this better and that change in attitude and disposition has been a very interesting opportunity and has allowed for the types of understandings of problems that Matt is describing as essential is in saying like now we are actually receiving more problems as opposed to before with our factor and our organizations coming to others saying we have a potential solution for what we understand of your problem there was a complete shift in attitude and saying hey I have a problem maybe you're one of the solutions and so I think this this change in mentality has been helpful that said I also think that a lot of the discussions around privacy services distribution what the how much information does the government need have how much do NGOs need have in terms of the information has come to the forefront and it's now becoming important to people that before maybe would not have valued it at a high degree so you know if you're thinking about economic development there are stages in which it's more important to you to have access to a service or to receive a benefit than it is for you to worry about the detail and what that costs you or even like in leisure like with Facebook do people really read the terms and conditions they just want to be connected to their friends and whatever and so we signed on to these terms and conditions and we didn't really care much about the details and then there was a reckoning and it was like hey how much data does Facebook have on and like on my friends and what did I permission through these terms and conditions and so I think the narrative of this matter is now to everyone and I'm you know working with a lot of on the ground groups in Asia in relation to the Rohingya refugee crisis they're asking the privacy questions and I think it's it's been very interesting and I know we're going to get into into sovereign ID but I just think it's been interesting the changes that this pandemic has created in one this shift of mentality institutionally but then personally how people are actually thinking about hey there's technology that is coming are we do we you know what is it going to cost us and what is it going to take from us and what is it and this like degree of suspicion with you know what they hear in the media and so I think the pandemic has really released an interest in technology that is bringing up more deep conversations about the meaning of what we're doing next and I think that's been you know overall a net positive in my book okay if I can just add a couple of thoughts on that I mean right at the beginning of the pandemic when it became apparent that you know the contagion was really a factor well then immediately a lot of the NGOs had to rethink how they were delivering certain types of services because a lot of times you know that service that aid is delivered by bringing together a large group of people into a physical space and keeping them there while you do the processing and the aid distribution so it really gave a great deal of impetus to the movement to support remote program delivery and one of the places where this has gotten some traction in the space that does actually use this technology is in direct cash assistance where it would be high very high risk to bring a group of individuals together to either give them physical cash or printed vouchers if they have access to a phone even even just a feature phone not necessarily a smart phone there are ways that you can deliver that assistance to them remotely and we have seen an increase in interest in that type of programming similarly we've also seen an increase in interest in micro work and other ways that people can continue to earn money despite the lockdowns so we have seen a few things come out of this but I think that like any other sector I think what we're seeing right now is that that the COVID crisis we all thought was going to give a big impetus for this move to digitization of service delivery and it's probably not quite lived up to what we were hoping would occur right but it like Lucia says the conversations are happening now and people are seeing the value and going oh wow we need to be prepared to something like this happens again and these sort of modalities are a way that they can address at least some of those of practical problems that are imposed by things like quarantine and highly contagious or dangerous environments you like and I think Matthew I think yeah quarantine obviously it has changed a lot of things right I think change shifted the mindset well and I think it more broadly did you know a lot of times in the past the crisis is it doesn't make it unsafe for individuals to get together to play off of what Rick was saying but I think that's always an underlying current the more vulnerable you get either the harder or the more dangerous it is to try to reach the actual beneficiaries you're trying to reach the humanitarian sector and so I think you know NGOs thinking about that and looking at how do I remotely serve individuals that have to in the pandemic but because even in a post pandemic world like having these individuals walk on foot four miles each way to pick up this voucher to pick up this cash assistance like I don't have to have them do that it's more equitable to not have them do that and so that's where I think you know to Rick's point I think COVID hasn't lived up to forcing the digitization the way we thought it would I do think it's accelerated so on the tail of us I still think we'll see rapid digitization of that last mile that's a place where and again blockchain's really well suited for that for all the reasons of decentralizing trust and making it so you can park things at an address make sure only the right individual has access to that address and they can pull it down in whatever context they're in but that that remote servicing is going to be a huge thing going forward that the pandemic really this was a problem ahead of time it was just a problem we were able to deal with and the pandemic kind of said we have to find ways to not to not do it the way we've been doing it so it has helped hopefully mindset and hopefully I mean I've seen it the whole promise of digitization it's accelerated some people had a plan to do stuff by 2030 this is in the non-humanitarian sector suddenly they're implementing the 2030 plans because we need to digitize today so how can NGOs better prepare then for next crisis are the things that they can do now out of those lessons from yeah I'll jump in there I think really there's a couple of real practical nuts and bolts issues that are holding back the rate of adoption in the sector one of the big ones is the lack of expertise within the sector right it's quite hard to obtain the personnel the physical talent the people who understand how to build these systems and how to design these systems and second also very very related the programming people within the NGOs by and large obviously there's exceptions in places like kiba they don't understand how to design programs to take advantages of these technologies and so if your program people aren't designing programs and building this into the programs when they go off and seek the grant funding well then there's no funding for it and so they don't deploy it and it becomes chicken and egg kind of cycle right so my point is is that capacity building within the NGO sector is really one of the huge keys to seeing the expansion of this technology footprint within the sector and I'll I'll talk on like a lot of people look at well my NGO is doesn't have enough funding to have an innovation group or my you know there's a bunch of reasons you know for those that are skilled and I think kiba happens to be skilled enough that we can have our own internal team but even in the absence of that you don't have to be able to run all these experiments on your own there's plenty of communities I'll put in a plug for hyper ledger like you can get some of your developers who are not working on blockchain and say hey I want you to spend eight hours a month in the community at hyper ledger like spend the first three months seeing what's there in hyper ledger and then filter down what are the project like which hyper ledger projects and you can go to any of these open source communities but like which hyper ledger projects are probably most relevant to us and you can have you know an army of one who's spending you know one 30th of their time leaning into the sector and you can actually learn a lot because you'll see the pilots that kiba is doing you'll see the stuff that aid tech's doing the stuff that emerge is doing you'll get to see all these things and again then you can be in the situation where you're not the NGO with the solution looking for a problem you're an NGO that hits a problem and says hey I've seen how we can do this in a better way like and I think that will help where blockchain can help these NGOs be better prepared especially when it comes to emerging tech solutions for these crises. Yeah I also think capacity building by nature like through partnerships right I think you know start the startup space and the NGO faith have been historically at odds because of timing because for a startup who's you know possibly early stage they're looking to get a contract they're looking to work on a project a proof of like show something deliverable because then they can turn around and raise a series a you know or they're looking for growth and scaling right so that needs to move at a much faster pace than the NGO space has to because they have to be more measured because of the potential ramifications of deploying anything too early or too you know too unbuilt per se and so the fact that these two timings have never aligned I think the pandemic has changed that in a certain way where like I think there's a greater understanding of the sense of how much timing is holding both sides back in the humanitarian sector specifically and so finding ways to develop stronger partnerships and thinking also in terms of like futures in the way that this red cross project is sort of like a future-based initiative I think that might be an interesting way to sort of develop the right kinds of partnerships so that if you don't have the resources to capacity build if you don't have a developer that can go into a hyperledger community and understand what's going on if you don't have any capacity or internal IT team then you can still tap into that with the right kinds of partnerships that are oriented for capacity building and then the other thing I would say is you know the fact that a big a big question in a lot of tech companies minds is like the ecosystem is not easy to understand like Matt you know Rick and I have spent a lot of time in the development sector in the humanitarian sector other tech companies have not but they have a lot of value to add to potentially improving some of these solutions and I think any work that can be done that is non-technical that is really healthy for the space of humanitarian technology or ATEC or whatever we want to call it is this notion of like how do we map out the ecosystem of the problem that we're trying to solve how do we map out and provide as much non-technical information as we can so that if there are technical companies, hackathons communities that want to work on components of problems within the open-source community that there is greater understanding of a world that is obscure to them right now and I think that's really valuable and I think it would accelerate the pace at which innovation can flourish without necessarily being intentional or contracted and I think that would also be very healthy for the space. Okay so it sounds like open-source is also we're talking about obviously hyperledger is open-source so is open-source something that's really helped the humanitarian space and you see a space there to continue be a support to your work? Absolutely at Mercy Corps for example we were pro open-source and it was part of the values within our technical teams there not only because it allowed us to tap into the broader community but also allowed us to give back and so yes open-source is absolutely key I think and I would say same for Kiva for those exact reasons and I'll add like a lot of the stuff we're doing in blockchain and in technology we're trying to hand these systems over to local capacity and I personally believe it's a disservice to hand them closed-source stuff where you're going to have specific vendor lock-in giving them open-source where then locally they can modify they can maintain this so not only is it cheaper it's just frankly better if it's open-source for these individuals because then they can branch it and move the directions they want to move with it. Same for us and I think it's realistically the way to onboard and to successfully get buy-in when it comes to NGOs or government organizations that have been using certain technology it's much easier for them to bring it onboard or to if it's something that is already out in the ecosystem that they can have their teams sort of look into and then prepare for as we migrate over to their system so yeah. That's great to hear so and it's great as Rick said contributing back as well and Matthew so that's wonderful so that's what open-source is all about so let's focus now maybe on a subject I think we picked up at the beginning self-sovereign identity and I think Lucia may not like that name but we'll get to that so Matthew maybe as an expert in space you can talk a bit about what self-sovereign identity is and how Kiva has very much been a leader in this space and self-sovereign during this pandemic has become to the fore as as a technology definitely. Yeah and self-sovereign Lucia I think has come now full circle where like it got used wrong, got painted in the wrong light and now I think it's a little more neutralized in terms of what it is but you know at its core self-sovereign identity is if you want to like technical definition it's an identity system where I could actually issue an identity for myself I can say I'm Matthew and I actually think that's right as a base construct that I'm Matthew it doesn't matter who somebody else says that it is I'm Matthew now obviously to go do things in the real world we have to have a trusted party like you know everybody on everybody on this panel here knows me well enough that I could probably self-issue I'm Matthew and you're fine with that but for others like for somebody Julia knows his friend who has never met me maybe he's a trusted intermediary and he can say hey I want you to meet my friend Matthew and then that person says cool like I trust that you're Matthew and maybe he trusts lending me 10 bucks to buy coffee probably doesn't trust enough to give me money to buy a car and trust that I'll pay him back it's like so as the need for trust goes up the need for a trusted issuer of identity goes up okay so there's self-sovereign identity anybody can be an issuer so why is this really important well I think when you think about these vulnerable contexts and you think about hey we need to digitize we need to get them digital identity there's really two ways to do it there is the way that we've done digital identity traditionally which is there is a centralized server and you log in through that server and like that server owns your identity and they happen to lease a copy of it to you so you can use it to log in or authenticate or something else and we did that because back when the internet was started people didn't have a supercomputer in their pocket they didn't have an internet connection like it was infeasible to actually do what we have in the analog world of handing someone a physical card and saying take this physical card with you and use it when you need to identify yourself and in the rare instance that someone needs to verify that I actually issued this to you like the passport agency then here's how they can call me or make a server call to me to verify that that is still valid you can do that digitally today and so self-sovereign identity if you play out to what is it actually today that I have for folks who aren't super familiar is exactly that like I want to give you a digital wallet and I want to give you a digital credential that is just like a physical driver's license or a physical passport but it's digital and I'm going to give you the ability you sovereignly without asking me permission you to share that credential or pieces of that credential your birth date your first and last name your address to share that at your discretion and I'm going to provide an avenue that if that person says well I can see this was issued by the U.S. passport office but I want to verify they haven't revoked it like giving them an avenue to be able to call back and verify and so that's what you're seeing out in the wild and honestly that's a much better solution why is that so important well think about the world's most vulnerable think about a refugee they're running out of Syria to Jordan to a UNHCR camp we talked about how they show up on the camp they've had to burn their passport so they don't get caught with it so like that physical credentials gone you can't call the government of Syria out of the servers in the country or they're not going to share it so wouldn't it be nice if there was a digital version of the passport that the person can run they're not carrying it they don't have to burn it they can get to the UNHCR camp and they can authenticate in and say hey HCR I can prove to you that the government of Syria issued me this or I can prove to I was a doctor how many doctors become refugees and end up not being able to practice medicine or even provide basic medical like like first aid support because the proof that they're a doctor or an attorney or you know picked your profession has vaporized when they left self-sovereign systems decentralized systems allow that to happen and I realize I'm going to get off topic if I keep going but like that's the true power of self-sovereign identity is you can today you can actually digitally give the person a copy and they can keep it and that's hugely and powerful for populations where trust in government might be low or where they might exist in multiple modalities or they might cross borders frequently it's a really cool thing clarification my background is actually in non-digital identification documentation so I come from the world of like issuing and so I think the real problem that I have with the with the term itself is number one the ways that it is unconsciously defining what digital identity means for the future and I think I sort of talked a little bit about this Julian earlier today and I know that Matt you've heard me talk about it but the way that we defined identity and identification when it was first like conceptualized in a national ID kind of way was in 1539 and in 1539 the government of France took data that the Catholic Church had been collecting for many years and used it as the basis the base database for what became the French national identification system and that data what was in it was occurrences right so it was data that related to you know someone has been born someone has been married someone bought land or you know earned land someone died someone got a divorce whatever it was but it was vital occurrences throughout time and that was how we defined a person's identification it was what are the events that are happening in their life now flash forward to you know and this is one of this but flash forward to about the 1930s 1920s and we start hearing a question around identity that are not related to occurrences they're more related to innately like what are you who are you and like what are you made of in terms of race in terms of genetic traits in terms of all of these other aspects of identification and that fundamentally changed the way that we viewed identity and what kind of data we wanted to collect for national ID systems and naturally the types of data changed and we have what was then what the Nazi party had as a as an identity registry and what other countries eventually had as identity identity systems that collected the type of data that is a lot more sensitive and we see the early stages of biometric data as like an interest area for building these systems and so now we're at this phase again where we're trying to redefine what identity is going to mean moving forward in the digital space and we're still building by the way centralized systems in intention but all of this data is like using AWS and IBM cloud and all of these like centralized servers using centralized data collection companies that are building the IOT software that are using centralized you know cellular protocols and so we have a long way to go in terms of decentralization we have a long way to go in terms of real sovereignty and autonomy when it comes to the individual and so my problem with using the term is actually more related to the unconscious ways we are with digital identity moving forward and the way it is presented in contrast with the actual system as it is today rather than where we want it to head and then what that fundamentally means to what identification will mean in the digital space moving forward and how much reliance we will have in these kinds of systems moving forward if we are you know talking about unintended consequences we have many many years centuries even of experience in you know data collection that relates to the way we have gone wrong and so we just have to be really mindful of the way that the term is used at all and it just comes from my background in like dealing with undocumented immigration with refugees with very sensitive cases that relate to paper-based documentation so I like everything Matthew has spoken really speaks deeply to me but I also am mindful of the way that we unconsciously define this term for people today. That's a lot of information definitely but it's not a great depth of knowledge there right so I think identity is a continuing challenge right and how we define it who define it where you define it which country how you do that but yes so you're really concerned more about the term self-sovereign identity rather than the technology behind it right so and I think that's important to point out definitely. I mean both because again we're using centralized cloud but both in associating identification with technical rights with you know transnational rights and all of these these factors is really a question of that is constantly on my mind and how much a person understands of the nuances of sovereign identity I think is something that we just have to keep ever present so I don't like the term yes but I'm a big believer in the actual technology. Yeah because I think it's done amazing things for Kiva done amazing things and see earlier on and enable many people but I think yeah this identity. I've been following you know since we first met years ago so I'm a big fan and I'm a big fan of the achievements it's just really a cognizant but I think in the humanitarian sector there is sensitivity around this concept and I just think we have to figure this out in a way that allows people to understand what it is that the system that they're being put into plugged into for the next you know decades. Okay so we're now coming coming to the end so I think I'd like to ask one quick question actually how do people get involved so obviously I think it's open source people how would you advise people if they want to get involved in this kind of blockchain and humanitarian journey maybe we'll quickly go around that and then I'm going to ask you a quick question a quick wrap it around question so let's see. Oh great great. Rick you go ahead. Okay all right and I've got a real short answer too number one. Number one if you don't have one already download and install a digital wallet learn how to custody your own coins learn how to do transactions get familiar with this stuff number two learn a programming language go out and learn a programming language and someplace like the hyperledger community is a great place to start there's so many smart people there there's so many helpful people there in short get involved get your feet wet start developing fluency with the fundamental tools that come with this technology and then you will figure out what's the right path for you that's the way to get involved. Okay, excellent. So I think maybe I'll just go to the wrap around no question at the end right because I think you covered it beautifully Rick. So basically get involved in technology understand it get involved in the open source community just get out there right don't be afraid just get involved so quick question around for each of you one act between it's number between one and ten ten being you know good and one in ten. So yeah it's between one and ten good so number between one and ten what how would you describe where we how we're using blockchain in the humanitarian set today one out of ten today and how do you think we're going to be looking like in five years time between one and ten. So how we are today between one and ten and where you think we're going to be in ten years between one and ten and I'm going to do this in reverse alphabetical order. So Rick you're on mute you're on mute everybody you're on mute yeah well because I really didn't want to be the first one to answer that question I would say today we're somewhere in the area of three or four okay where are we going to be in ten years with the pace of change in this sector we're going to be at nine or ten. Okay excellent I like that that's positive so now you've got a base Matthew where would you go from here yeah I'd probably go a little lower than Rick on both I'd probably say today we're like at a one like between a one and two we're like at a one and a half and then I think in five years we'll be at a five or six in the humanitarian sector well I'm just going to sit comfortably and I'm going to agree with Matt on where we are today and I'd say I'm also on the one to two camp but I do think that the pace of innovation is awesome and I think that the change in the attitudinal change that has been taking place over the past year and a half I'm pretty optimistic that we'll be at an eight or nine I will say that in recognition of objective fact I have a track record of being overly optimistic about the sector in this regard so just FYI I don't have to explain what I do anymore and I think that is making me super optimistic yeah I haven't had to talk about mount gox in quite a while all right well thank you thank you all I think we're going to wrap up here this has been an amazing wonderful conversation you know such great panelists that's great knowledge and we have such a short time we'll have to do this again I think soon thank you the whole audience for listening and so yet again thank you Lucia thank you Matthew thank you Rick thank you BSN for helping organize this and take care everyone and please Kate you know please look after yourself and get involved all right take care everybody cheers bye thank you