The UNICEF Innovation Fund is looking to make $50-90K equity-free investments to provide early stage (seed) finance to for-profit technology start-ups that have the potential to benefit humanity. The last date of submission is February 28, 2018
If the start-up is registered in one of UNICEF’s programme countries and have a working, open source prototype (or willing to make it open-source) showing promising results, the UNICEF Innovation Fund is looking for such start-ups.
UNICEF is currently looking to invest in a group of companies developing software solutions on open blockchains. Examples of these include, but are not limited to:
Smart Contracts
- Using smart contracts to replicate and improve on existing organizational mechanisms
- Efficiencies, transparencies, and accountabilities in contractual engagements (i.e. multi-sig contracts that guarantee certain actors were involved)
- Transparency in distribution of resources (can we better show where our money is going?)
- Interactions across groups (what would a SWIFT code for development look like, if described in Solidity?)
- Increasing access and use of tokenized systems by creating more user friendly and more secure interfaces
Analyzing data
- Using machine learning to understand the activities on public blockchains.
- Can we develop unicity from transactions on public blockchains?
- Could we use crypto-flows to help organizations and governments do and understand their transactions more efficiently? Can we use blockchain data to solve humanitarian challenges? (i.e. using bitcoin data to fight human trafficking)
Tokens
- Can crypto tokens work to incentivize or support behavior that benefits humanity?
- How could we connect various tokens to each other to maximize human potential?
- How could we utilize digital scarcity, non-fungible tokens, or digital collectibles for social good?
Mining
- Can we use passive distributed mining networks to create investment funding opportunities for the UNICEF Venture Fund? (more on cryptocurrency mining)
And + funding is not necessarily limited to the above. UNICEF is interested in companies that use distributed ledger tech in new, groundbreaking, ways that are scalable, and globally applicable.
UNICEF’s Global Innovation Centre takes game-changing innovations and deploys them at scale, across multiple countries and contexts. The goal is to implement and scale global solutions that will help the world’s most vulnerable children, using funds efficiently and effectively.