How might Blockchain help Islamic Relief Worldwide respond to and reduce the impact of disasters?
A 90 minute Service Design Workshop looking at Disaster Relief Supply Chains and the potential of Blockchain Technology, to help overcome some of the biggest and most persistent challenges.
Participants
The Service Design Workshop was part of a wider Charities Working Group meet-up hosted by Bond (the UK network for organisations working in international development) at their Offices in London.
The overall workshop looked at 3 different sector challenges and was facilitated by a team from Blockchain Digital.
This post relates to the 1st challenge focused on supply chains, the group exploring this challenge had representatives from Islamic Relief Worldwide and the Saïd Business School Blockchain Strategy course.
Process
The Group followed the Blockchain Digital Service Design process which is based on IDEO Human Centre Design and the UK Design Councils Double Diamond Design Process.
New Service Objective
Creating a system for charitable aid management that would provide Islamic Relief Worldwide with enhanced coordination, tracking, traceability and audit-ability of aid throughout the aid supply chain.
Blockchain Is Not The Answer
There is a huge array of mature technologies for business problem solving, so before starting the design workshop we wanted to make it clear, if another solution could be found it should be used as blockchain was still relatively immature technology. There are however some challenges where Blockchain creates significant value compared to alternative technologies. Strong pointers in favour of using Blockchain technology as a solution includes circumstances where: 1)There are requirements for multiple parties to share data and update data, 2)There are requirements for verification of data and / or actors within a process 3) An intermediary provides a service today 4) an intermediary can be removed to reduce cost and complexity.
Service Users
Given the restricted time for the workshop the group decided to focus on a single service user
Service User Jobs To Be Done
The following main tasks were identified for Aasall the Humanitarian Manager. Dispatch impact assessors to meet people impacted and assess help required, prioritise help, Identify sources of aid from donors this includes individual, companies and governments, apply for aid, source supplies, get funds and purchase aid / transfer cash, schedule, track and monitor aid supply, Support import / export regulations, get permission from parties on ground to deliver aid, identify and validate aid recipients, deliver aid to end recipients, audit and report to donors.
Service User Challenges
Keeping track of where goods are at any moment in time, ensuring aid gets to where it needs to be in a timely manner, it’s very time-consuming reconciling donations and delivery of aid retrospectively over multiple data sources, transferring cash aid through the banking system is difficult and time consuming, coordinating efforts of all parties is difficult, validating receipt of goods at each step is difficult, delivering aid into conflict areas and ensuring it reaches the end recipient is difficult, especially early on when teams on the ground are just mobilising.
Service Context
In this section the group were challenged to identify trends, barriers and regulations that would impact the future service
Trend — Increased use of cash — Cash as a means of providing aid to those in need is increasing. Its seen as more dignified and provides the ability for the recipients of the aid to choose what they need most and to purchase it. This trend increases existing challenges with monitoring cash, ensuring it reaches the intended recipients, auditing where the cash goes, moving cash to aid zones that are subject to sanctions, moving cash through the global banking systems and finally ‘cashing out’ — the end user getting physical cash.
Trend — Increased need for auditing and transparency — There has always been a need to audit the end to end supply of international aid, but this is increasing and in turn places an increasing burden on charities. The end to end auditing of the supply of aid with retrospective reconciliation is time consuming, resource intensive and challenging.
Regulations — The group didn’t have time to discuss the regulations in detail but touch on the fact that all the standard import export regulations and financial regulations such as KYC and AML apply.
Outcomes
The group identified the following as key outcomes the service needs to deliver:
Tracking and validation — the service would need to provide tracking and validation of the donations (both physical and cash) from source to recipient
Multi party access — All Parties involved would be able to access the services to view up and down stream activities and to update and validate transactions
Permissioned access — Access to the service would have to be controlled
Audit reporting — The service would meet the needs of parties in terms of auditing the end to end flow
Co-ordination — The service would support the coordination of the supply chain and the timely delivery of the aid to the recipients
Benefits
The ultimate Benefit of the Service is that it will enable Islamic Relief Worldwide and their donors to respond more effectively to disasters, reducing the impact, by ensuring vital supply chains and lifelines for vulnerable communities are quickly established, controlled, measured and maintained.
Business Network & Actors
At this stage of the workshop we were running out of time so could just fit in a very quick pass at the business network; Impacted People and Communities, Suppliers, Local Government, Donating Governments, Corporate Donors, Individual Donors, Impact Assessors, Banks, Teams on the ground, Media, Regulators, Coordinating Networks, Finance Teams
Service Value Proposition
The new Service will be a cross sector service that will enable the entire business network involved in the delivery of charitable aid to coordinate, collaborate, join-up and optimise their efforts ensuring vulnerable communities receive maximum positive impact from donors support.
The Service will support donors, regulators and charities with governance, audit and reporting.
Blockchain Solution Fit
Now that the workshop was complete it was time for the group to go back the initial blockchain pointers and consider if their new service could be delivered on a blockchain platform, does it meet the following criteria?
There are requirements for multiple parties to share data and update data, there are requirements for verification of data and / or actors within a process, An intermediary provides a service today, the intermediary can be removed to reduce cost and complexity.
The group decided there was a strong pointer towards blockchain technology.
Permissioned Consortium Blockchain
The Group agreed that a permissioned consortium blockchain would best fit the requirements for example Hyperledger, Corda, Multichain or Enterprise Ethereum
Next Steps
This use case will be shared with the sector Collaborative Requirements Register, discussed with the Charities Working Group and wider Community (now over 100 members) to see if there is an interest in taking this use case to a proof of concept. Thoughts, comments and feedback most welcome.
Charities Working Group
The Working Group was inspired by Sir Mark Walport’s ground‐breaking Distributed Ledger Technology: Beyond Blockchain and the call to action in the Lord Holmes of Richmond’s Distributed Ledger Technologies for Public Good: leadership, collaboration and innovation, for sectors to come together and explore the benefits of DLT.
The Charities Working Group Community was formed as an Open Collaboration Community that welcomes Charities, Regulators, Donors, Technology Providers, Academics and Citizens to provide a space for all those interested in exploring the benefits of Blockchain and DLT to join in a Charities sector collaborative effort, to collectively consider how these new capabilities might help charities make a bigger impact on the lives of the communities and people they seek to serve.
The Community is supported by an overarching steering group that feeds community ideas, insights and requests back into the work of the UK Government APPG on Blockchain. Working group members include Bond, Charites Aid Foundation, Islamic Relief Worldwide, Overseas Development Agency, Blockchain for Good, Blockchain Digital and BBFA.
