Digital financial tool blockchain is being put to use in the humanitarian sector to try to ensure every penny of aid makes its way to projects and is not wasted along the way.
Britain’s Start Network, which includes 42 leading aid agencies such as Oxfam, Care International and Save the Children, said it has teamed up with social enterprise start-up Disberse to use blockchain.
“This exciting partnership could lead to the transformation needed in the way money flows through the humanitarian system,” Start Network director Sean Lowrie said in a statement. “[It] could catalyze a new way of working, one that is transparent, fast and which drives accountability to taxpayers and those affected by crises.”
Blockchain, which first emerged as the system underpinning virtual currency bitcoin, is a digital shared record of transactions maintained by a network of computers on the Internet, without the need of a centralized authority.
It has become a key technology in the public and private sectors, given its ability to record and keep track of assets or transactions without the need for middlemen.
The new Disberse platform is to use blockchain technology to ensure that less money is lost to banking fees, poor exchange rates and currency fluctuations, Start Network said.
Fraud is also a major issue within the international aid system.
In 2012, then-UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said that 30 percent of all UN development assistance was lost to corruption.
As blockchain automatically records transactions on a secure ledger, donors can easily follow the money lowering the risk of financial misuse.
UK-based charity Positive Women has completed a pilot project using the Disberse platform to reduce transfer fees to educational projects in Swaziland.
Aid was sent from Britain to four Swaziland schools via a local aid group, and the savings made by using the Disberse platform enabled Positive Women to fund an additional three students’ fees for a year.
“We normally use our bank to transfer funds, but transfers have become increasingly expensive and slow. Using Disberse, we saved 2.5 percent [on fees], which covered the costs of a year’s education for an additional three girls,” Positive Women director Sarah Llewellyn said.
The new partnership using the blockchain technology is to scale up to work on a series of small disbursements within Start Network’s existing programs over the next six months.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
RSS