To close out the day, we have an interesting panel, How Can Blockchain Help Connect the Next Billion? I'd like to welcome our panelists, Anda, Salima, Gabin, and Rajesh, along with Naroa as moderator. Just a couple of quick words on Naroa. Naroa is the map and tech work for Giga, UNICEF. Prior to UNICEF, Naroa lived and worked in various companies in Kenya from a startup that is trying to change the world, understanding agriculture to a nonprofit empowering local entrepreneurs through access to finance. Naroa holds a master's in electrical engineering from Stanford University and a master's in telecommunications engineering from EHU UPV. Naroa is also a proud EF fellow. Please join me in welcoming our panelists and Naroa. Hi everyone. Can you hear me? Perfect. Thanks so much for joining us today. I know it's the last session of the day, so we appreciate you being here. We actually have a quiet, interesting and diverse panel here, so I'm sure that you'll enjoy the time. As the title says, we'll be talking about Giga and how blockchain can help connect the next billion. But what's Giga? Giga is a partnership between UNICEF and ITU to connect every school to the internet and every young person to information, opportunity and choice. By connecting schools, we in one hand equip young people with the skills they need for their future and at the same time, we build digital economies for the communities that are around these schools. There are many connectivity initiatives out there. I always say that what's different and unique about Giga compared to others is that we use data and technology to make the whole process more efficient and more transparent, in particular blockchain technologies. That's why we are here today. The panelists will have a discussion about the blockchain applications they are building and that they are implementing and deploying in different countries. The applications go all the way from stake-in, NFTs, tokens, smart contracts and others. With further ado, I'm going to let each of them introduce themselves. Okay, great. Hi, everyone. My name is Andan Naba. I serve as the Chief Operations at the UCC Financial Innovation Hub, where we translate the latest academic research into novel blockchain applications. Before this, I served as an analyst at Convergence Partners, a TMT-focused equity firm focused on Sub-Saharan Africa, and great to be here. Thanks. Thanks, Narara, and great to be here also. Thanks for inviting me. I'm Rajesh. I'm one of the founders of Launch Notes, and our whole reason for being is to help people become self-sufficient Ethereum stakers. So it's great to be here, and we're looking forward to sharing more. Hello, everybody. My name is Salima Ba. I'm a State Council from the Directorate of Science, Technology and Innovation, which sits within the office of the President of Sierra Leone. I mainly, well, over the past two or so years, I've been leading the project coordination as well as some of our policy work. Thank you. And my name is Gerben Kainer. I work as the Blockchain Lead for Giga at UNICEF. Thank you so much. Nice to be here. So, Gerben, let's start with you. You work at UNICEF, and UNICEF is not the type of organization that people would think of that's working on Blockchain, that's building tech products. Can you tell us a little bit about Giga's tech team, how it works, what type of work you do? Sure. So, Giga sits inside the Office of Innovation at UNICEF, and we're a kind of small team of like 40 people, approximately, and we operate kind of like a startup within UNICEF itself. Are there any, like, Blockchain developers in the room, maybe? Could you guys stick your hands up? So, we're growing our tech team. We actually have a position open right now, if you want to come talk to me afterwards. But basically, so far, we have connected approximately a million students to the Internet. And the challenge that we really face is how to connect the next billion. So, to do that, we see Blockchain sort of adding value in a couple of different ways. The first one is we estimate needing approximately $428 billion to connect the world schools. So, our biggest sort of, well, our first sort of use case is moving all this money around and getting it to the right places in a way that's transparent and efficient and affordable. The second option that we see value in is automating payments for connectivity. So, using smart contracts and monitoring connectivity in schools to automate payments to Internet service providers. Then we also focus on NFTs. So, at the beginning of this year, we launched the UN's largest NFT collection called Petra Kingdoms, where all of the royalty goes to fund Giga, goes to help support Giga. So, that's kind of a neat thing. And we're also working on follow-up projects for that particular project. And we're also investigating innovative financing solutions to pay for the operational expenses of connectivity. So, one of them is connectivity credits. Another one is where we're looking at using staking to allow people to stake their ETH and generate returns for paying for connectivity. But basically, we work with governments to try to convince them to give us like a regulatory sandbox to try these things out, try them for the first time so that we can scale them up later and deliver some impact. So far, the most of the projects I mentioned are sort of in the MVP stage and we're seeing some promising results. So, we're looking really forward to making an impact in the coming years. Perfect. As you said, I think for people that are not familiar with UNICEF, we operate in one, 90 countries, I don't know, 90 countries and something special or different that we work very closely with governments. And all the product solutions that Herman was describing, we work closely with governments to implement them in country. And that's where Salima, you come from the other side of the puzzle where you see the government of Sierra Leone. So, I'd like to tell us a bit about this unique or different directorate of science and innovation that you have in your country, how it was set up, how it impacted the innovation ecosystem in the country and what you do. Sure. So, the directorate of science, technology and innovation was established by the current government in 2018 and the main mandate is really to leverage the use of science, technology and innovation to support the government deliver on its national development plan. So, by that we work across various sectors and we've also developed a 10-year national innovation and digital strategy which is our 10-year plan to digitally transform Sierra Leone and we focus on three key areas which is digital economy, digital identity and digital governance. And as I said, because of where we sit, we really in a space where we're in a position to work across various sectors. That includes the private sector, we work with various private sector partners in Sierra Leone, out of Sierra Leone to really support the development of our local ecosystem because one of our aims is to really establish Sierra Leone as an innovation hub. One of the works that we've done is to kind of work with the private sector to develop an ecosystem mapping of the innovation sector in Sierra Leone so being able to know what the different services and players are within the field. Other place where we work is we work with public sector partners, that is all the different governments, ministries, departments and agencies basically supporting them in the different work that they're doing, seeing how they can use science, tech and innovation to really achieve the government agenda. And also finally, one of our key areas where we work is our international development partners, we work with various international development partners and one of our main partnerships has been with UNICEF from the start. The UNICEF Innovation Office in Sierra Leone has been really key to the work that we've been trying to do and one area where we've really worked closely is to support the government in its education agenda, which is really the flagship of the government's human capital development agenda. With that, we've really worked on various projects such as GIGA which we're talking about today, we've also worked on other, actually even before officially GIGA was announced we worked with UNICEF to map the geolocations of all the schools in Sierra Leone. So that was really key as Elaine found the groundwork for the work that we're doing now with GIGA. But then one of the projects that we're really also proud of that we've worked with UNICEF Sierra Leone is on learning passports, which is really a partnership with GIGA. They kind of go hand in hand. So that's kind of sort of the work that we do within the space in Sierra Leone and so we're really happy and excited to be here. Awesome. And we'll be talking about some of this work in a little bit before that. Now we want to Can you still hear me? Yeah. We want to announce an exciting project that we've been working on for the last year in partnership with the Ethereum Foundation under Rwandan government. It's the first time that we are publicly speaking about this show. We are quite excited about it. Fantastic. Thank you for that, Nora. So yes, we have a video coming up very shortly which kind of explains more about this project. So rather than kind of spoil that let me just give you the outcome and the outcome is that Rwanda now has a solo staking infrastructure, which means that it can use staking rewards from staking Ethereum to fund internet connectivity in schools and that's a world first and pretty exciting. So yeah, that's been great. The other thing I'd like to say is we're really now at a stage where the proof of concept has been running for a year, it's been successful we've seen the outcomes from that and we're inviting the broader ecosystem to get involved. So we want our competitors to get involved. We want developers, we want other people involved in the Ethereum ecosystem to take up the baton now and to move this forward. No one entity can do this Gig has been fantastic in catalyzing the whole program we've had support from the Ethereum Foundation and elsewhere but 50% of schools in the developing world don't have internet connectivity right now. There's billions of dollars staked on the Ethereum network at the moment some small fraction of that could certainly help change lives so that's really what we're saying here. And I think the final piece really is to say the technological aspects of this were one part of the project but really the other challenge was bringing people together, bringing people along this journey two years ago there was no such concept as Ethereum staking it hadn't been launched and yet here we are effectively two years on and the random government has done something which no other country has done so far. And that didn't happen by accident there's been a lot of negotiation workshops, working groups education sessions, briefings to bring us to this point and in particular leadership on the ground from the leader of UNICEF in country in Rwanda Juliana has been amazing Minister Ingebirra has also driven this project forward we've had support from the Ministry of Education Finance Central Bank of Rwanda and ICT and really everyone coming together and working collaboratively has made this happen and it's a model now that we hope we can scale across the world. Can I ask a quick sort of follow up question about that? I'm sure all of you guys are wondering why is this so complicated staking just makes sense why aren't we doing this can we talk a little bit about why is it so complicated to do this in a country like Rwanda? So again two years ago staking wasn't even a thing and if you imagine the complexity of getting anything changed in a country I think Salim has probably got more insight into how to make that happen than anyone else here but it does take regulation to change it does take people to really grasp the concept and we've been immersed in this for years no doubt a lot of people here would have been involved in Ethereum and other blockchains explaining that to people and taking on this journey isn't a straightforward thing it takes a lot of courage a lot of bravery really to kind of adopt this as a concept and to take it to government departments and say this is something we want to do so a lot of that time hasn't been installing servers and putting software on devices it's been around the table and with your support and Naroa's and others so that's really why it's been complicated and I'd say that it's also linked to the regulation around crypto they're a given country it's allowed to hold crypto or not so linked to that for this first pilot and after many back and forths we decided that we're going to have the node hosted on the cloud instead of locally can you tell us about the why of this decision and maybe elaborate also on the pros and cons of each of them like locally hosted versus cloud yeah so that's a great point along this journey there have been a range of key decision points what Ethereum client do we use, where do we want the infrastructure to be hosted, should it be cloud, should it be on premise somewhere and I'll start by saying our whole philosophy aligns very closely with the Ethereum foundations which is geographic diversity is key and having diversity of software client is really important as well we don't want any we don't want to be too many people hosting in one particular place that's our strategy and the reason I stress solo staking is so important is because it makes people self-sufficient which again is part of our approach so for practical reasons, for speed reasons for resiliency reasons it made sense to use the cloud for the proof of concept effectively longer term we want every school to have a node, we want everyone to be communities being able to stake and run their own infrastructure and that will be a fantastic achievement when that happens long way there but I agree that and Salima she's one of the first ones starting the journey towards that goal where in Sierra Leone you are actually setting up or in the process of setting up a node that's locally hosted so I think we've gone in terms of the proof of concept but I think we've started with looking at a physical hosting instead of cloud but I think this is where collaboration and one of the things actually we've also tried to do is an engagement with some of our other government around who are also doing the same thing, we've had a couple of engagements with the Rwanda government and the point is to really learn together, learn lessons and making sure that we're all working towards the same goal so for us as I said we've really looked at how we could lay the initial groundwork for hosting a physical node as you said obviously we also want to be in the position where every school does have a physical node but we're not at that place yet looking at the different challenges that we face so one of the things which we wanted to do was looking at the possibility of hosting nodes with specific internet service providers so for the initial preparation for that we've kind of sourced the hardware that will be required we have an agreement in place with one of internet service providers who would also be one of the service providers actually providing connectivity to the school I think we're in the last stage of preparation and we're hoping I think within the very near future to officially launch a physical node Fantastic, now that's great and another thing that we're hoping is going to be the norm moving forward is internet service providers taking crypto as well as payment because what part of the hurdle right now is you'll have to convert from Ethereum to fiat currency to pay for a service we've had conversations with ISPs where they've said no we'll happily take payment in Ethereum and that I think will be the future as well I think same as sincerely on the conversations with ISPs has been very encouraging I think where the conversations now is at is with other government partners public sector partners looking at the national bank of Sierra Leone who regulate that space and the ministries of finance and that kind of sort of thing just making sure I think I think the initial conversations around the legislative framework to do this kind of sort of thing I think that's been the areas where we've been having the more conversations around but then also making sure we have the infrastructure as well ready for that another thing to mention I think is the roadmap for Ethereum clients means that it will be a lot easier to host nodes you won't need the resiliency and the to store full versions of the blockchain in the future so again it's going to get easier and easier for people to host their own nodes which is fantastic what I find really interesting to sort of hear is it seems like everybody's kind of on board with this everybody like thinks it's a good idea but still it's like so difficult so how do we talk to governments and help them understand and help them shape their policy I don't know Salima do you have any insight into that as a government representative I think it's a combination of several factors in terms of why we currently don't have it and what can be done I think for me where I see I think it's about highlighting where the opportunities are with this I think first of all the opportunities with regards to blockchain especially when we talk about Giga and how that can be utilized for smart contracts and used to improve the relationship with internet service providers provide better accountability and monitoring and transparency I think highlighting those opportunities in terms of getting everybody on board but and I think also beyond that there's a bigger opportunity with regards to most of these emerging technologies when you deal with the government or traditional governments such as ours I think it's about opening up the space for learning I think it's about improving the local expertise within different nations and it's about improving awareness so one of the things we're excited at DSDI about Giga specifically looking at because we we believe in leveraging the use of the most high tech technology as well as the most not low tech but the most useful for our current situations looking at we also utilize things such as ussd and those kind of platforms because we consider our local context issues such as electricity internet penetration rates so all those are important but with Giga and blockchain and possibly even looking at cryptocurrency as payment the opportunity for this our government is to pilot these technologies within a very small space which will hope then raise awareness allow us to learn about these emerging technologies then use the data and evidence to really develop a really effective legislative and regulatory frameworks that would better support and enhance this so we want to get ahead of the pace we know these technologies are coming whether we like it or not so the opportunity with this is really to provide a pilot where we can really use this as an opportunity to learn much more about it which would then enable us to better regulate it so I think that's where the opportunities and the learnings will really showcase in that to get everybody on board exactly and showing its value right one of the challenges I don't know if it's a challenge but we usually face it that we have to communicate super technical and complex work to people that are not technical or don't necessarily understand the technology and what happens sometimes it's that if you mention the word crypto smart contract to someone that doesn't understand it then they get scared they're not on board so the moment you start proving it starting small and making small things and small steps then I think they understand the value and they start becoming more comfortable. I guess from outside as well on your point coming from an emerging market like South Africa to drive cryptocurrency adoption you need to meet them halfway so one of our PhD candidates has actually developed a solution where you can send cryptocurrency via use cases we spoken to one ISP who actually approached us saying this could actually work leading communities pay for internet connectivity so those conversations are still ongoing but that whole project made us realize that we can't just ideate and silo and think people from South Africa or from Sierra Leone or whoever will meet us halfway we need to go to them and bring solutions to them even with speaking about blockchain and everything they don't even have to necessarily know what blockchain is. I always have this argument of people they'll be like you have to educate everyone about blockchain and this and that but how many of us know how a light bulb works you know you just know you turn it on how many of us know how aircon works you just turn it on so I think this view that you have to educate people about everything about blockchain and this and that for them to be on board it is incorrect and we should rethink that. We need to make everything work and we all know that I especially for them it's easy to go to cities, to urban areas and it's harder to convince them to go to more remote community schools from your experience working in the private sector what type of incentives business models we need to make them also go to places that maybe are not as easy to connect. Yeah I think you know there's obviously tax incentives that South Africa is now doing, we looked at it's just tokenization now of the last mile infrastructure maybe you could have a big private tick the private equity firm put the capital expenditure at the beginning and then resell that after three or four years when they fund life cycles not coming to a need to local communities you know and then the revenue they're able to get in the interim can then sort of subsidize the resell price so they may not need the large multiples that you need in terms of a general sale and why once invasive in the fiber asset in Ghana and a few other countries and we're struggling to now we were struggling to sell it now to a third party because we could only sell it in the sort of the 25% we owned it but if we could tokenize that 25% we could sell it to local ISPs we could sell it to people who have extra money when I just want to help other people but because the framework wasn't there yet we weren't able to do that so on your point as well how much was it in Africa alone it's $100 billion we can't look to the financing mechanisms that we've done in the past to sort of solve future issues we have to completely rethink how we do it and things like blockchain and tokenization I think will be you know the key to doing that I mean absolutely like nobody likes making banks even richer right so no not me definitely not anyone at this conference and that's something that Aggigate selfish experience well this tokenization and building a token system that where schools are granted a certain amount of tokens based on how difficult it is to connect them and then providers if they decide to go to schools that are harder to connect they'll get these tokens and they'll be able to exchange these tokens for a set of incentives maybe one thing there is that again for these incentives we have to work with the public sector so I guess highlighting the necessity to work with all the players in the market all the way from the private sector to the public and have them have conversations together good I think as well academia so from I now work at the University of Cape Town and it's often a place that we don't consider so we really now translate this sort of academic research from a PhD master's level to blockchain applications and I think we also need to come to the table now because you need a new way of thinking like I was saying a private sector company that's been making huge margins from certain connectivity for 10 to 20 years they're not going to change how they do it you know you need new people now to come to the table and challenge the status quo which is what we're trying to do at the hub I think but I think that's a really interesting sort of contradiction because on one hand we have to rethink all these things and on the other hand if you want people to join you on the journey you have to work with their systems and you have to make them understand that way and I don't see it as old world versus new world in the same way it sounds like you do I think big corporates are coming along for the journey now increasingly they're understanding what blockchain is about they're looking at their own proof of concepts and pilots and yes they've got other motivations potentially but this is an opportunity for everyone the way we see it and that you work again closely with startups in the region more in general what are some of the trends around blockchain and startups that you see in the African region so around blockchain we're now seeing less financial sort of We're now looking at a decentralized data marketplace where data creators can actually sell their data to other people That could now be used maybe find connectivity for example We also have an NFT startup that is working with content creators to let them share revenue based on their contribution to a work So he's particularly working with Authors and wants to work with illustrators now So I write a chapter for book you write a chapter for book and my tree gets more views We'll get remunerated more. So those are some of the interesting use cases We're seeing the month of money one I explained earlier about the USSD crypto currency payments as well It's on the financial side. So it's quite an exciting space and I mean our hubs only been operational for about 18 months and we have six spin-off startups now. Let's just come from academic research, which has been really beautiful to see Maybe some people here that are in the UNICEF crypto fund could also source some of these startups No, and you could share Yeah, we are I'll connect you guys. Yeah And her when following trends before you spoke about some of the past work or work that Giga has been doing Could you give us a sneak peek of what's coming next or what's next and some of the things that you're excited about for the next year Yeah, for sure. So The last year has really been about like building MVPs and talking with governments and getting them to allow us to do things And I think we've made like a lot of headway with that. So for example We're now starting to roll out a product called gig accounts, which will allow Payers for internet connectivity to monitor contracts Get sort of real-time data about the performance of the connectivity at schools and then Register payments for that. So we're quite keen to roll that out and what we're hoping to achieve over the next year for that is to Start issuing our first sort of smart contract contracts, I suppose So the the idea would be that Internet service provider would connect to school and then automatically receive payments if internet connectivity is detected so that way we can make it way easier for Internet service providers to to receive payments and Reduce a lot of a lot of overhead. So that's one of the projects that we're quite excited about about progressing another one is we're building a sort of collection on top of our Existing NFT collection the the original NFT collection patchwork kingdoms that we that we launched was all about fundraising So, you know, you purchase these these tokens you get a really cool sort of data-driven art piece And the and the funds go to Giga to to help Giga connect schools. What we're building next is a Collection where we will create an NFT for every single school in the world and really not put the focus on fundraising or raising as much money as possible, but instead sell these two people who care about the school communities get them in the hands of the people who actually support these schools and Create a sort of gamified platform where we will reward Reward people for contributing data about these schools So we'll create a crowdsourced data system for collecting school data And the idea is to make the the largest sort of decentralized school database in the world Yeah, and that raises many interesting questions Such as if you are crowdsourcing this data What's the consensus mechanism that you'll be using to approve or to ensure quality of the data that you are gathering and This type of like interesting new questions that we didn't have before. Yeah, absolutely And I've learned a lot at this conference about About ideas like that. So it's been super useful to to join this conference and learn more about that Yeah Herb and a follow-up We've been saying that sometimes it's like it takes a lot of work to to make changes within the government or make Government bodies to innovate Unicef it's not a government, but it's also a huge organization that has many many processes in place How is it to a work in this type of things within Unicef? Yeah, you're right. It's it's a very big organization I think I come from sort of the world of startups where things go super fast and you break stuff and you try again So that's certainly that's certainly big difference But I always like to sort of compare the the progress Unicef makes as like glacial So it's like super slow, but it's unstoppable. So I think Unicef opens a lot of doors Yeah, we're talking with central banks and ministries about implementing some some real change in countries And we're finding it really difficult to do that. So imagine being a being a startup and trying to get a get a meeting with the central bank governor to to approve your well-intended sort of crypto project so Yeah, so I think Unicef has an important role to play there in sort of opening the doors for these kinds of things opening the minds of governments and Yeah, and allowing a lot of other startups to to then make some real progress So many advice on how to yeah, maybe interact or get that difficult meeting that everyone was talking about Yeah, sure, and I think One of the things I'll say looking at the model that we have in Sierra Leone is I think Not it's not just because I work there, but I think having Institutions such as like the directorate of science second innovation in Sierra Leone has been really key. I think especially when you work within Developing countries such as Sierra Leone where science second innovation has not been a big player and Local expertise is not there. I think one of the if I would advise I think one of the key things would be for each government to have It's a version of a DSDI as we call it because I think it really Cuts across and really enables that partnership to develop. I think we're lucky within DSDI to Sit us we call play with various Different individuals we have lawyers. We have our developers. We have our data scientists I have a policy advisors and all of these individuals sit and enable us to do what we do And I think that's why we were able to really Form an effective partnership with UNICEF Sierra Leone and the innovation office I think in terms of having one of the few like innovation work plans and a work plans out there with UNICEF I think that's been really key and I think we kind of Play the role with UNICEF off we develop our projects together We establish our goals and then DSDI plays the role of fronting with the government on behalf of UNICEF so we would go to Government partners and I think also the fact that we sit within the office of the president of Sierra Leone Gives us a lot of leverage in times as when we go and knock on those doors like the National Bank of Sierra Leone to say Together with UNICEF. There's this great projects which we want to try out Those with blockchain and crypto could you please? You know engage with us with us on this and they're willing to do that. So I think for me what's really important. It's having that very high government and political buy-in Into these kind of things and then and even with us even though we do we have our challenges But I could just imagine Having to do this or trying to do this in countries that don't have that high level government to buy in that could Potentially be very difficult. So I think One of the key things that have been useful to us or have enabled us have a lot of the progress that we have is having that Seat and being able to Interface with UNICEF with our government development partners with the private sector with other international development partners So being like in the middle of all of that and being able to coordinate it I think that's been one of the key things Some more than maybe to learn from and replicating other places. Yeah, it's interesting We met with the Columbia team earlier this week We were talking about the types of things that you could do together how to start working in different aspects that we're discussing And what we're told is that here? It's actually quite difficult because they don't have this type of coordinating body that you have in Sierra Leone What they were telling us is that there are Ministry of Education Bank Ministry of ICT that each of them work on their own And that it's difficult to coordinate the work across all of them Yeah, and I think maybe just a quick nugget. I think which would be interesting actually So the chief innovation officer of Sierra Leone who effectively leads DSDI is also the current minister of basic and senior secondary education and a lot of our projects as I mentioned do Deal with education So I think that gives us an added leverage in terms of really being in the critical space to be able to coordinate All of these activities So a lot to learn definitely and it's been a we've been working with you for many years now And I think that the things that we've achieved it wouldn't have been possible otherwise Maybe as follow-up questions to both of you what would be the Main opportunities that you see a with blockchain in your context Yeah from tokenization like I spoke about earlier We're also looking at blockchain actually for dynamics patron sharing because in South Africa a lot of this picture It's owned by the large MNO's and the small players don't have enough capital to obviously partake at the auction But there is sort of time during the day where spectrum isn't that used by the big MNO's So we're looking at now using blockchain for dynamics picture I'm sharing where an ISP in a small town like Ramstown I went to high school can now use spectrum from 10 p.m. To 5 a.m. You know at a lower cost than what they sort of use it during the day So that's one interesting use case we're looking at it. I guess in this context Thinking out loud it wouldn't be possible me to do something similar also with pricing for connectivity depending Apply something similar to that. Yes. So the pricing now would be dependent on how much the ISP would get the spectrum Obviously when it's underutilized this pricing would be less So I guess that's the keep it aside It's still very early stages the government announced it a few months back And we just now started writing a few concept papers to see what we could do But that would be the model, but we're hoping we can move forward with it And yeah, so from my side, I'm very much kind of immersed in the world of staking and just the possibilities that Every individual can be supporting this network and can gain rewards from doing that So whether it's a small community or a school or a project for climate change We just see the march of technology enabling that more and more So we're working with a range of entities who want to use staking returns for different things The beauty of this model as opposed to traditional kind of philanthropy is that you can put your money on a node Use that node for good and then take your money away later and put it Do other things with it So it's not a case that you have to donate and your money's gone forever And I think that's quite appealing when the The need for capital for some of these projects is so vast. So yeah, there's lots of exciting kind of technological developments We're just excited to be part of it And then as you said, maybe it's not huge values But you can start distributing and decentralizing this hosting and each school could have for one node where The revenue maybe it's not huge but enough maybe to pay for Internet in the wrong school absolutely and and you know different models as well So we touched on liquid staking for example right now It doesn't have to be the case that every school needs 32 Ethereum for its own school or multiples there of there could be liquid staking across Rwanda or South Africa or Sierra Leone and Different entities have different amounts, but they all gain staking rewards So there's a lot of different avenues that this could progress through Yeah, so I think the biggest opportunity I see is in Moving all this money around so Paying for Internet connectivity in countries that may Have like a lot of corruption or something like that I think blockchain can really provide a little transparency in that and a lot of fairness in that So I think I think that's a that's a huge opportunity Yeah, I think Going off especially with the smart contracts and the real-time connectivity monitoring I think for us those have been really Exciting on both ends. I am the private sector specifically or also excited about the fact of having a smart contracts And there's no discrepancy of whether how much connectivity did I actually provide and that back and forth exchange? So that's been exciting on the private sector space because actually so we have been in the process of connecting some of The schools which currently have connectivity to that platform to be able to monitor in real time But then from a government perspective, it's also very important for us being able to really hold ISPs accountable to their service contracts that they signed because Before if you have no way of really monitoring the connectivity that they provided You're just really paying out without being absolutely sure that what you're paying for was delivered So for a government perspective that's been really important to one of the the Areas which we're really looking forward to exploring a bit more Yeah, absolutely because Usually what's the case is that for a lot of these schools the connectivity is paid for by a government or You know units of country offers or something like that And then one person is responsible for monitoring 150 schools or a thousand schools And it just becomes impossible to sort of check whether the connectivity is actually delivered and the schools themselves have no Negotiating no negotiating power with their internet service providers. So Yeah, one of the products that we're offering to schools is this sort of application that they can install themselves on their net work that will Provide us with real-time internet connectivity data So it's really a tool for them to sort of take control over that and allow a huge body like UNICEF to put their weight around Making sure that internet service providers are providing the connectivity that schools deserve Yeah, let's try the video now Yeah, yes, you say that if any of the things that we spoke about seemed interesting to you Whether you are interested in joining our team working with us Scan that QR code and sign up so that we keep you in our network and we can count on you in case you need your help And yeah, the last thing is that we have a video that we wanted to show it's not appearing here though So I don't know if someone I Exciting and innovative approach to fan school connectivity Giga wants to use a theory of staking as a new sustainable model to generate income to find a long-term social impact Blockchains like Ethereum allow individuals and organizations to contribute to network security availability and processing power by staking fans while running their own nodes within the network in return for providing this service participants and staking rewards a Theory is the most widely used smart contract capable blockchain and is now a proof of stake blockchain Which effectively eliminated the energy usage that was associated with its former proof of work model Anyone who comments that it we can benefit from staking rewards This model of staking provides regular rewards over many months and years Enabling a wide range of different use cases that can deliver societal benefits and social impact from the money that is earned Giga is working with the Ethereum Foundation and the government of Rwanda to provide the first example Providing funding for school connectivity in Rwanda launch nodes is an institutional provider of investment graded period Solo staking products and services and was the implementation partner for this pilot project in Rwanda How does it work number one people and organizations that are interested in supporting school connectivity? We call social stakers commit ether Number two giga stake the ether by running value data nodes Number three the rewards generated from the nodes are used to pay ISPs on an ongoing basis to enable school connectivity over the long term Number four after the agreed staking period the original ether can be returned to a social staker or continue to be staked for ongoing schools connectivity Number five the value of the ether may rise or fall over the staking period Giga has donated the first 32 ether for staking Enabling the rewards to pay for connectivity at pilot schools in Rwanda In the future Giga plans to allow people to pledge less than 32 ether which can be pulled and staked to support Giga This is a future functionality that is not live today Giga is setting up Ethereum validator nodes for schools in Rwanda in partnership with the Rwandan government Yeah, we peace applause we can wrap up the panel. Thanks. Thanks everyone. Thank you all. Thank you


What's going on everyone? Sam here with late sports cards. I'm a 23, Panini Mosaic, football, no huddle, five box break, number three random team stuff. Look again at your random results. As always, you can find those on the website under the results tab as well as the link in chat. So good luck everybody. Yeah, you know, you're good Jason. No need to apologize. How long this is going to take to rip? I don't know if we're going to be ahead of schedule, behind schedule, I don't know, we're going to be somewhere. We'll make it up on Panini Black because that takes no time. Oh, whoa. Three run homer for Moreno. Tiki Barber. I'm going to get the camera. Call camera and I'll yell at him about it. Yeah. Jack Campbell. Bigsby. Have they been through the order already? No, right? Bijon debut. Auto Michael Dean Perry. Nice one there for the Browns. Again, the Blues are the base auto, which is a little bit interesting. But yeah, Bryce Young. Nice one there. I'm Duike Uzoma. Infinite URA. Dude, I know. He hasn't gotten it out yet. We're going into Carlos Rodan territory now, Clayton. Come on. Kick it up a notch a little bit, buddy. Cadarius Tony for the Chiefs, 250. There you go, Brandon, W. Moment in time of Deshaun Jackson. Aden O'Connell, Disco. Will Levistrooky, Joey Porter. Not through the order yet. Premier Gibbs, debut. Disco of Gabe Davis. Mingo and Kansman. You have to at this point. You really have to. Blue, Staphon Diggs for the Bills to 75. That is Mahomes, Kalaisha Kansy, and Michael Wilson-Rookies. You know what the funniest part about this is going to be? You know what really the funniest part about this is going to be? Kershaw is going to pitch terribly. It's still going to be better than that Carlos Rodan. Yeah, that's true. Blue, Cedric Tillman to 75. Nice one there for the Browns. Herbie Silver, Deandre Hopkins, Murphy, Overshaw. I'm with you on that, Jonathan. As bad as that was, still not worse than Carlos Rodan. Disco of Daryl Rubis, Jackson Smith and Jigla. You know what drives me insane? My dad is such an apologist for Carlos Rodan. We get into an argument about it every time. He's like, oh, we need to see another year. They're like the majors in ERA in 2020 and 2021. I'm like, well, have you seen enough this year? She knows Smith, because I sure have. I sure have. 135 ERA right now. Good lord. Of course, I have no diamond backs in my lineups. CJ Stroud rookie. Silver, Aachen. I'm surprised you didn't take care of him. I mean, it's all about the budget though. That's the problem. You barely only get like, because with pitching, pitching takes up so much money. You get like one stud and then you just have to kind of get lucky. Mufiou is my stud for today. Will Leviss. Pink is Garrett Wilson, the 50 for the Jets. Can I do a dice roll on these? One, two, three, left, four, five, six, right. On the carbon copies. If it is numbered, we'll do a separate random at the end. That is going to be a four. They're going to go to the right. They're going to go to the right. Right. Young rookie. Oh, 100% Rodan's contracts worse. 100% remarch. We're still stuck with that for like six years now. Falcons gone. Thank you, UN. And Shane with a spot tomorrow. Down to two to go. Steelers and Packers, I believe. No, Falcons bear Steelers. Falcons bear Steelers. Three to go. Three, two, go. The Yankees don't figure it out in two years. If I'm Garrett Collin leaving. Like if the Yankees stink again next year. Let's go. Head and hook it, rookie. They've you. Falcons in this. No, no, that's fine. We'll do like golds and under or whatever the out of 25 is. Drake London. Because they're all so differently numbered in this. Yeah, 20. Is that out of 20? Yeah, you can do that one. You can do the pinks out of 20. That's going to be Rishi Rice. Rookie Otto. Nice one there. Chiefs Brandon W. Congrats, buddy. I think he pops off this week. He's a stud, man. Goldberg, Jimmy Garoppolo, Jamiro Gibbs and Anthony Richardson. Yeah, exactly. At least, yeah, you'll get the occasional Homer out of. There's Achan out of Stanton. We got a goal. Deontay Johnson, the 10 for the Steelers. That is Lawrence Taylor. Simpson. I would say so. Most likely. Yes, illegal. No, I don't think that's wrong at all. Big Ben. You said you were a Red Sox fan. Yeah, then it's a little different. That'd be like me being like a Masataki Yoshida fan. You know who you are. I'm not. He's a bot. That is Josh Jacobs Disco. Harrison and Kelly Ringo. Confirmed bot, Masataki Yoshida. Confirmed. Firm go. Firm bot. Vlami Fajoco Jr. to 50 on the purple. Nice one there for the Cowboys. Mingjo Green, Jalen Ramsey. And then Hooker Rookie. Another one.  Purple, Ocho Cinco. 250. DJ Moore. That's rough, dude. One-third inning pitch. Quinton Johnson. Look at that. Still not worse than Carlos Rodin. Yante Banks. Charbonnet and Jordan Adson. Who'd you take? He's under a pitching out for Kershaw. He's got one out. He just absolutely hammered that one. He took the laugh all the way to the bank there, though. Jeez, man. Randall Cunningham. Mingo and Cam Smith. All right, what you got, Carl? Let me hear it. Let me hear it. Bryce Young debut. Blue. Jordan Adson debut at 75. Carman Copy, Dak and Goff. Latu, Tink Delle. Yeah, cash the under on that. Good lord, man. Like I said, laughing to the bank on the under there. Henden Hooker debut. Silver Munoz. Mahomes, Disco. Murphy, Overshown and more base. Fox Trace. Hand in the play. He really does, dude. It's weird. Like, the thing that sucks, too, is like we're always going to look back at Kershaw and be like, yeah, he sucked in the playoffs. Like, yes, he got that. He got his ring, luckily. And he pitched well in that World Series.  And then now, my God. Disco, Jimmy G. Spears and Jacory Unvenet. Miles Murphy, Disco, Witherspoon. And Tyler, like, dude, Devon Witherspoon looks nasty. We got a hell of a game. Bijan, debut. He's looking good, too. Diane Henley, 275. Blue for the Chargers. Herbert and Allen. Carter, Strange and Base. Redemption Aroni coming up. Ah-Chan. Redemption Aroni is going to be Stetson Bennett. Rookie Scripps, no huddle, blue. Going to the Rams. Congrats, Los Angeles. Mr. Stetson Bennett, Georgia legend. Actual Georgia legend. Could use him right now, man. Go back for his eighth year. Silver, Mameen, Joe Green, Herbie. Ojalari, Muzzgrave. No, but he was, he was like a big reason why Georgia was so dominant for so long. Jackson Smith and Jerry Beyer. We'll give him that. Demarion Overshown. Clark Phillips and Randy Mull. Three, two, go. I'm putting in one. Again, we will be doing a full sellout promo at the end of the break, at the end of group breaks, Nick Chubb. Where five people will win $500 in break credit each, which will be awesome. Staphan Diggs, National Pride Purple to 50. Nick Foles, Philly, Philly. Philly Special. Philly Special. You want to run the Philly Special? I don't want to fight by that. Probably one of the worst. That can't be worse than the helmet, guys. No, no, I don't think so. Nice. Ah-Chan, 220, 10 of 20 on the debut. There we go. Congrats on that one. They're dolphins. Very solid. Silverchoron Bennett, Jalen Waddle. Roshan and DTR. Johnson, debut. Quaral Patterson. No, nothing is worse than that. Nothing. That's boring my childhood. Literally, I was terrible. There's Najee Harris. That's why I was so happy Illegals in chat for that. No, no, not necessarily. Yeah, debut. Yeah, just the debuts of the horizontal ones. That's the only, I think those are the only horizontal in the set, like this one. Bryce Young. Silver or T- T-Sizzle as a Cardinal. Bijan. CJ Stroud. Threl Davis. Two. 85. 75, just kidding. Picker Mayfield. Skaronski and Achen. They really do, Illegals. I never knew they had that for that year. Yeah, right.  He was a Raven for a little bit. Really? Yes, he was. Not a very important Raven, but a Raven at one point. And that Patricia. Yeah. God, he's like Greg Roman and Mark Tressman for the Ravens. No, Marty Mourningwag.  McKeel. McKeel, Harry. Yeah, there you go. McKeel, Harry. Decay. Yeah, could have had Debo. Could have had McClaren. Third one, James. JSN Rookie. Current Eagle, Matt Patricia. Eagle Legend, Matt Patricia. Eagle Legend. Let's go, Trey Tucker. Anthony Richardson, debut. God, Otto is Dolan Reisner. That's cool. That's some O-line love right there. We're going to find that for the Broncos. Either you on picking up a spot and Mark picking up a couple of Personals. Thank you, buddy. Silver's, eh? A Patch of My Homes. Risi and base. Senior Defensive Assistant. Shotshdubs. Design and Rocket together. Breton Strange, 275. Aiden O'Connell, Bryce Young Rookie. Zach Charbonnet. Good, Judy. Illegal, are you around for the Marty Morningwag Eagle's head coach era? I hated Marty Morningwag, dude. Oh my God. That guy was the worst.  There's Jamiro Gibbs, Disco.  But my God, dude, we have been through the ringer with the coordinators. And holy hell, I've got some bad ones. There's Marvin Mims, Purple. Nice one there to 50. Yes, yes we do, Brandon. Yes we do. Adrian Pearson. There's certain products where we don't. There's certain where like the base might get split evenly, but this product, you get all of your base of your team.  Joe Burrow, Pink to 20. Nice one there. Four of 20. There is Davis. Zay Flowers, Disco. Yeah, there you go, man. Welcome. Yeah, absolutely, Brandon. No problem, man. Any questions you have, feel free to ask for sure. Zay Flowers, Rookie. Yeah, of course. I was there from Monday morning, like, oh my God. Vaughn Miller and CJ Straub. So a lot of nonsense in this stream and chat. Jordan Madison, a lot of nonsense. A lot of nonsense. Disco, Will Leviss, Rookie. Joey Porter, Jr. DC, yeah. Yeah, the coordinators under Reed Rowe is uninspiring. That's true. Will Leviss, Rookie. Silver Acre, Disco, Josh Jacobs, Michael Meyer, Tyree Wilson, Rookie's. No, I was going to say, Reed was always in control, right?  Like, Biennami never got, probably never going to get a head coaching job. There's Collar Murray to 75. Tony Dorsett. Sounds like a lot of hoopla. Hoopla. Blink. Serban Byer, dude. Jim Johnson. Yeah, that's true, man. That was such a failed experiment, Vaughn. Holy cow, man. It was so bad. What's kind of like Bella Chex? Bella Chex coordinators never really became great head coaches.   Hasn't really been good in either. And then, what's his face? Romeo Cornell was terrible in Kansas City that one year as well. John Mechie, the worst team in the league. Yeah, I remember that. I remember that. I remember hearing about that. Yup. That's Jimmy Garoppolo to 75. Pickett and Jones, carbon copy. Yeah, McDaniel's not good. He was really bad in Denver and he has not been good in Vegas either. Wayne Kerbett, nice one there. Congrats to the Jets. That's a cool one. Wayne Kerbett. There's some really cool names in the auto checklist. Will Leviss. Lamar, I was looking at it earlier today. There's Jared Goff. But I mean, that's kind of the case with a lot of coaches. Like, there's a lot of coaches who are great coordinators and only great coordinators. They're not good head coaches.  Gibbs. Charbonne, Disco. Right, exactly. I mean, you saw that Reisner. The Reisner is sweet. Now, I'm Minnesota Viking. Dalton Reisner as of recently. Purple to 50. Joey Porter Jr. DJ Turner. CJ Stroud, Disco. Mims and Henley. But there's nothing wrong with being a great coordinator, a great coordinator only. There's Drake London to 50 on the Purple. Disco, Randy Moss. Wooden, Sam Laporta, Rookie. Great year that kid's having. Yeah, Fangio. Fangio is like the prime example. One of the best defensive coordinators in the league. Well, a terrible head coach. Cam Smith, Sean Clifford, and Drew Sanders. Right, exactly. It's better than what everybody's doing, being a great coordinator. It's awesome, dude. Ze Flowers. Disco, Derek Carr. Blue, Joe Montana to 75. Disco, George Pickens. So I'm hoping Todd Monkin stays for a while. I like Todd Monkin a lot. Yeah, that's kind of true, to be honest, Shipe. That's not, like, wrong. Silver Parsons. Kenny Pickett, Disco. Ward and Quentin Johnson. Quick recap, guys. 20. Pinks, Joe Burrow. Devanna Aachen. Garrett Wilson. Golda Tan. Deontay Johnson. Otto Stetson Bennett. Dalton Reisner. Wayne Kerbett. Michael Dean Perry. Paul Otto's in that one. That'll do it for the break, everybody. Thanks again for the fill. Up next is number four.


You probably know the aid and growth debate has been going on for many years, you know The big question really is has all this foreign aid that we've been putting into Developing countries has it actually stimulated Higher growth rates. So that's the question we've been looking at that remains very controversial. So a lot of people have historically said Either no or we can't tell from the data So what we've now been doing perhaps the main aspect of our work is We've got a longer time frame to look over so previously people were looking from the 70s to the 80s So just maybe in five ten-year periods But now we've got 30 to 40 years of data and that helps a lot because we can look at longer term average growth rates and once you do the The I mean there's quite a lot of technical work involved, but once you do it carefully we tend to find a A positive impact of aid on growth that is not massive, but it's it's reasonable and at a moderate size So our conclusion would be that if a country had received Ten percent of its GDP and aid over an extended period of time its growth rate would be about one percentage point higher Then had it not received that aid So that's the general conclusion. This is on average so on and so forth So it doesn't apply to any individual country, but this is the kind of average that we're getting out of the data in Mozambique has come through a long process of civil war and so on and so forth and Finally the the process of conflict finished in the early 90s and it transitioned to to a democracy And since then there's been a lot of what you might say rebound growth So just catching up to where it was in the past because of the the nature of the conflict But what we're seeing now is that a lot of those gains are In a way that a lot of the the gains from from from catching up And not so much there So the question is where does where does Mozambique go from now and the big challenge is is agricultural sector So, you know about 60 percent 70 percent of all people work in the agricultural sector normally in small farms And the biggest problem that we're seeing is that a lack of productivity growth in that sector. So for For a lot of people not just me who've worked on Mozambique It's generating or Stimulating productivity growth in the agricultural sector is going to be critical for a more inclusive growth process we one of the advantages of Productivity growth in the agricultural sector is that it makes food cheaper So therefore there's more scope for wage employment in principle that it becomes More attractive to create factory jobs and so on and so forth because the wages are out of more reasonable potentially more reasonable level So, you know, the owners of factories can can still make profits at reasonable levels So there are benefits from that also by providing More produce onto the market it creates the opportunities for other industries such as agro processing So ideally there will be if there's a productivity growth in agriculture that could help Encourage other industries to start developing. So that's one one aspect. That's not the only aspect There's other things that need to happen in the economy through business reforms through opening up of trade and things like that That would also be beneficial. I think oh There's always the tough questions. I think focusing on the agricultural sector is fundamental and how to do that. I Think there's some there's some quick wins that can be that can be achieved through for example providing high productivity seeds Better road and infrastructure and so on and so forth. So I think that would be the focus, but also I believe The government of Mozambique needs to be willing to experiment So we don't know which specific policy will work to promote the agricultural sector So we need to be able to let's experiment with one or two different public policies if they don't work after three or four years That's fine. Let's try something else But having an open mindset and being willing to fail. I think it's very important There are regional dimensions certainly linking more closely with South Africa There's huge potential there. I mean the energy prospects as well for the region are very important So course Mozambique needs to be looking both inwards and outwards quite as Contribution is that it's it's a very Extended and well-respected network. So a conference like the one we're attending today Brings in people from all over the globe not just from universities in in Europe not just universities in the States but Practitioners as well So it also links together people in a network throughout the world both in the advanced countries and in developing countries I think that's critical and provides a platform for policy discussions Which don't have any particular ideological basis? I believe so being part of the UN system Is is important in that kind of philosophy? I believe