Advancing Sustainable Funding for UNICEF Digital Public Goods
Supporting UNICEF’s digital platform for humanitarian cash assistance
The UNICEF Office of Innovation, through its Venture Fund, is piloting Drips, a decentralized blockchain-based application that enables holders of digital assets to support open-source Digital Public Goods (DPGs) with demonstrated global impact.
The Drips protocol distributes contributions across the software and developer communities that sustain these DPGs through an integrated dependency-sharing mechanism. This approach promotes transparent, sustainable financing for open-source technologies that underpin humanitarian and development programming.
As part of this pilot, the Venture Fund has established a UNICEF Drip List comprising five UNICEF-supported DPGs with proven results at scale:
- Bebbo – a parenting support application reaching more than 1.6 million families in 17 countries.
2. HOPE – UNICEF’s information management system for humanitarian cash transfers, serving 25 million people in 33 countries.
3. Oky – a menstrual health and rights application supporting over 1 million girls in 12 countries.
4. Primero – a child protection case management and incident monitoring platform used by 20,000 professionals to manage 2 million cases in 70 countries.
5. RapidPro – a platform for designing and scaling mobile messaging interventions, with more than 8 billion messages exchanged in 131 countries.
Contributions made via the Ethereum blockchain are allocated equally among these solutions and securely managed through smart contracts linked to each initiative’s open-source code repository. This mechanism ensures transparency and accountability while allowing recipients to receive funding without requiring cryptocurrency wallets.
Click here to support HOPE and help sustain UNICEF’s humanitarian cash transfer systems that deliver assistance to millions of people worldwide.
