The United Nation's World Food Programme (WFP) set up a pilot program in early 2017 which leverages blockchain technology to improve the process of providing food assistance to Syrian refugees in Jordan's Azraq camp. Part of WFP's “Building Blocks” program which demonstrated early success with a similar pilot in Pakistan's Sindh province, this blockchain solution substantially reduces the costs associated with delivering humanitarian aid. The initial pilot, which consisted of 10,000 people in the refugee camp, eliminates the need to carry paper money, vouchers, or e-cards. People verify their identities by using eye scanners at the point of purchase, this provides access to their unique account and seemingly enables transaction logging on the blockchain, which the WFP refers to as a private fork of the Ethereum blockchain.

The implications on humanitarian aid and the larger international development sector are significant. By leveraging biometric data for identification and authentication, and relying on the blockchain as an immutable distributed ledger, aid organizations add powerful fraud deterrence measures and substantially reduce costs. The new blockchain-based solution reduces the presence of third party intermediaries who not only add costs to the process, but have also been known to skim funds or misdirect aid. By logging transactions in near-real time on a distributed ledger, data is instantly created and secured – reducing problems caused by the mismanagement of data.

Emerging technologies enable humanitarian organizations to do more with less, providing support to more people and continuously improving operations by drawing insights from data as it is collected.

• Background on the World Food Programme's “Building Blocks” initiative
• WFP's article describing the use of blockchain in Jordan's Azraq camp
• Fast Company article profiling the work
• WFP's article about the use of blockchain in Sindh Pakistan