Humanitarian aid through blockchain is growing. Now that the world's largest aid organization has come under scrutiny, it is more important than ever. Can technology provide a better distribution of the funds?
UNICEF Columbia has launched an Ordinal Collection to gather funds for the fight against malnutrition of children under five years old in La Guajira and Vichadas, two of the country’s poorest districts.
The 800 Ordinals of the collection are units that makeup “La Oferenda” (the gift), a digital art piece depicting two hands holding maize—the country’s staple food—in vibrant colors.
The work was created specifically for this campaign by the Columbian muralist and visual artist Oscar Gonzalez “Guache.”
“We want to invite the Bitcoin community to collect Ordinals works of art that will help the children, ” reads the agency’s statement.
Each Bitcoin NFT costs around 0.0003 BTC ($26,51 as of today) and can be purchased in the Trio marketplace.
For every purchased Ordinal, the humanitarian agency will distribute 25 sachets of “therapeutic food” to children under five years old to reduce malnutrition. Malnutrition can damage a child’s health permanently or, when untreated, lead to premature death.
The website Crypto Altruists, which has been spotlighting Web3 projects for social good for the last three years, argues that “from a social impact lens, blockchain is the single greatest development since the internet.”
How?
Finally, as is the case now in Columbia, blockchain technology can make fund collection more efficient, immediate, and interactive.
In 2024 alone, the platform Giving Block, which offers a crypto fundraising solution to non-profit organizations, raised over $2 billion in cryptocurrencies, while platforms like Gitcoin and Giveth, which focus on funding not only non-profit projects but also projects aiming to solve some of the humanity’s largest problems, distributed tens of millions of dollars.
Humanitarian aid through blockchain might have a gap to fill with the recent abrupt shutdown of USAID, which was forced by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency under Trump’s presidency.
In many parts of the world, the United States has, until now, played a prominent role in helping the most vulnerable communities: in Columbia alone, the U.S. humanitarian arm had an estimated budget of $413 million for the present year, having contributed $3.23 billion in bilateral cooperation between 2018 and 2014 (the amount includes military aid).
Almost half of USAID resources were used to protect the Amazon rainforest, the largest carbon basin in the world, while the other half was spent on farming initiatives that help farmers move from planting coca to legal alternatives and humanitarian projects that help bring food to starving children.
Yet, humanitarian agencies, communities, and interested parties are bound to develop new solutions to help those in need and deal with the world's biggest challenges.
In doing so, they will use the most advanced technologies, including blockchain.