Cecilia Chapiro, is the Investment Adviser & Blockchain Portfolio Manager at UNICEF Ventures. Her focus is on sourcing investments across developing and emerging markets, managing blockchain portfolio of investment as well as other frontier technologies. In this podcast she introduces us to the UNICEF Venture Fund and to 3 startups use case studies: OS City, Atix Labs and StaTwig.

Cecilia, is also an entrepreneur, having co-founded Yunus & Youth an organisation working to support the growth of social entrepreneurship.

 

What is blockchain?

Cecilia, chose to define “what is blockchain” by assuming that we’re all at a party and we’re playing the telephone game also known as Chinese whispers. It’s essentially a word game, a communication game within a circle of friends. Let’s imagine that within a circle of 20 friends one person comes up with a first phrase and starts a chain of communication by whispering that phrase to a person on their left. Each person then takes what they heard and continues the chain of communication by whispering this same phrase to the following person.

This continues until it reaches the end of the circle back to the original source of truth. What usually happens is that the message gets distorted either intentionally or unintentionally. But because there's only one source of truth, any individual within that network who receives the message has no idea how truthful the statement that they received, is.

However, on the opposite end, if we think about that first person, the original source of truth, the creator of that phrase. If he/she announces the phrase to the entire group at the same time, then even if one individual decides to distort the message, there’ll be enough members of the group who can attest to the one source of truth. The truth is determined by the majority.

For Cecilia, this is what blockchain is all about. It’s distributed data that allows any member within the blockchain network to have a copy of all the data at all times, thus ensuring maximum security of the data.

 

UNICEF Venture Fund

Source: UNICEF

The UNICEF Venture Fund is a $30 million pooled funding vehicle focused on identifying, piloting and growing technology startups that improves the lives of children. They focus on startups that can impact more than a billion people and lie in $100 billion markets, in other words technologies that can impact large groups of people and be financially sustainable.

Blockchain is one of those key technologies that the fund focuses on. The fund’s main objective is to scale the successful technology solution into digital public goods to ensure open access to these new tools and the benefits that these tools can generate globally.

UNICEF Venture Fund provides startups with up to $100,000 of equity free funding. For this year’s cohort the investment opportunity is a blend of both USD and cryptocurrencies thanks to the UNICEF’s crypto fund that was launched in October 2019. This crypto fund is the first cryptocurrency denominated fund within the United Nations.

UNICEF doesn’t get a financial return on the investment but instead gets a return on the social impact th...