By: Laura Marissa Cullell Marketing & Operations Officer Can technology progress human rights? Provide humanitarian aid? Help combat Climate Change? Address issues of identity, trafficking, and provide access to food? The answer to these questions is yes. And Blockchain is a fantastic space to explore these issues right now. In the last article of our series on Unique and Interesting Use Cases for Blockchain, I explore some of the applications of blockchain to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Part I explored just some of the use cases of this innovative tech in…
Syrian refugees could regain legal identities that were lost when they fled their homes. by Russ Juskalian Apr 12, 2018 A few times a month, Bassam pushes a shopping cart through the aisles of a grocery store stocked with bags of rice, a small selection of fresh vegetables, and other staples. Today he’s wearing a black sweater tucked into denim jeans, which are themselves tucked into calf-high boots caked in mud. The Tazweed Supermarket, where he’s shopping, is on the periphery of a 75,000-person refugee camp in the semi-arid Jordanian steppe,…
In the Azraq refugee camp in Jordan, Syrian refugees queue in supermarkets where cashiers are equipped with iris scanners. Once identified using biometric registration data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), they can spend food vouchers provided by the UN World Food Program (WFP). Food voucher transactions for 100,000 refugees in Jordan are now recorded on the WFP’s Ethereum-based blockchain, a system called Building Blocks. By the end of 2018, WFP’s Director of Innovation and Change Management Robert Opp hopes that Building Blocks will serve 500,000 people — WFP’s…
