Nigerian blockchain company, Convexity Humanitarian Aid Transfer Solution (CHATS) will be pitching its humanitarian aid tool named to judges from BlackRock, United Nations, and Circle for a $100, 000 investment in the upcoming Circle’s solutions pitch competition event in New York, USA.
The pitch competition organised by Circle is aimed to showcase tools that enable rapid humanitarian aid and will tackle one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
The Head Investment and Business Development Partner of CHATS, Uyoyo Ogedegbe at a news conference in Abuja, said Convexity was recently named by BlackRock headquarters in the United States as one of the finalists that will be pitching at the Circle’s solutions pitch competition event.
He said Aid in Africa has been largely misappropriated which necessitated the initiative to block leakage.
“The continent has received $1.2 trillion in aid since1960. However, these funds have had no visible impact on the continent.
“CHATS is currently backed by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and has received a grant from the UN body.
“The core themes are financial inclusion, transparency, technology, and aid distribution,” he added.
Also speaking, Data and Research Analyst, Sandy Om’Iniabohs, said CHATS solution would promote transparency, streamline aid distribution process and help in reaching people in the most remote part of the world.
“The focus of our work is offline first for the beneficiaries as CHATS is four different applications and two dashboards.
“If you are an NGO, you have your own dashboard, if you are a donor, you also have yours. If you are the vendor or field agent, you also have yours.
“UNFPA reached out to us from New York and connected us to Turkey and Syria at the time of the earthquake early this year, and they wanted us to do the distribution. The issue then was that we wanted to pilot it locally and perfect the craft then before taking it globally.
“We are looking at the demographics of potential beneficiaries. In markets such as Turkey, many of them had iPhones and Smart phones” she said.
