Transparent, efficient progress tracking with blockchain

The UNICEF Venture Fund, part of the Office of Innovation (OOI), supports frontier tech startups in emerging markets, building solutions to social challenges for children and their communities. Frequently, the startups we back are small, agile teams of innovative technologists and entrepreneurs for whom UNICEF funding and mentoring is transformational.

Reporting progress, marking milestones, tracking spending, measuring impact and sharing information is necessary for partners and investors. It is also time consuming, eating into the day-to-day work of building and scaling digital public goods (DPGs).

Karma is a blockchain-based accountability platform used by tech builders to demonstrate their work, track their impact and attract new backers. The platform is public, meaning transparency and accountability are built-in, and data-sharing is simple.

We believe Karma may be effective in allowing Venture Fund grantees to report back with updates and milestones that feed into monitoring, evaluation and learning. To test this in the real world we are piloting Karma with the Venture Fund’s new Data and Trust cohort of seven startups in six countries. 

Good karma

Karma allows grantees to post milestones, updates and impact on the blockchain where they can be viewed and verified in real time by Venture Fund mentors and portfolio managers who provide their “on-chain attestation” that a particular milestone has been met. The verified and time-stamped progress record is fast, efficient and transparent, with the data available as live reports to all project stakeholders and the public.

The Data and Trust Karma pilot will, over the 12-month Venture Fund investment period, test whether a blockchain-enabled approach improves accountability, reduces time spent on reporting and portfolio management and improves future investment prospects for our grantees. The objectives are to:

• reduce reporting time for startups and follow-up time for the Venture Fund;
• create more consistent, structured progress data;
• build a trusted CV-like track record for participating startups, based on reviewed milestones;
• explore whether this on-chain record can strengthen due diligence and follow-on funding conversations. 

The participating startups will maintain a project profile on the Venture Fund’s Karma page where they will translate their workplans into a series of structured milestones and activities. They will post short, regular progress updates (with supporting evidence where appropriate) at least fortnightly, and when the project status changes.

Established Venture Fund channels will remain the route for reporting and addressing extraordinary issues such as escalating service disruptions, safeguarding concerns, data privacy issues or other matters requiring immediate attention. 

Next steps

Karma profiles will be set up by the startups and digital wallets will be created for Venture Fund mentors and portfolio managers. This will enable them to provide their on-chain attestations when the startups begin posting their regular updates for review and verification.

The performance of the pilot will be continuously evaluated. After three months of active reporting, we will seek feedback from participants, aiming for a positive response from a majority of startups and Venture Fund mentors and portfolio managers.

After six months, we hope to see reductions in time spent on logging updates as well as improved insights from dashboards and aggregated data that can drive clearer, evidence-backed storytelling around startups and portfolio progress.

Evidence gathered during the pilot will inform the Venture Fund’s decision on whether the Karma platform meets our needs for transparency, efficiency and accountability, increasing time spent on making progress by reducing time spent on reporting it.

You can follow the pilot’s progress at https://www.karmahq.xyz/community/unicef-venture-fund