Technology has allowed for quicker and more reliable remittance transfers and crowdsourcing efforts. Our team has learnt that although impact enterprises have different avenues to access capital, there remains a lack of transparency between the enterprises who receive funding and the funders who contribute to their financing. 

Our team has developed a blockchain platform known as  Circle of Angels - a social impact funding platform that matches small to medium-sized enterprises to funders across the world. Our platform allows impact enterprises to gain access to funding while creating traceability in where the funds are used all while measuring impact. Our aim is to foster accountability mechanisms and ensure consensus for these stakeholders.

We’ve found that the work done over the past year can be summed up beautifully in what Alina Siegfried says:

Frontier Technology for Social Impact Funding

Our team has developed a blockchain platform known as  Circle of Angels - a social impact funding platform that matches small to medium-sized enterprises to funders across the world. Our platform allows impact enterprises to gain access to funding while creating traceability in where the funds are used all while measuring impact. Our aim is to foster accountability mechanisms and ensure consensus for these stakeholders.

We’ve found that the work done over the past year can be summed up beautifully in what Alina Siegfried says:

Prototyping

The prototyping process began with many user interviews with the funders and impact enterprises. We learnt from this that onboarding users with user guides served as an efficient way of introducing a person to the platform and how the system works, enabling ease of use. 

We’ve also seen that through the impact reporting process, we have been able to leverage the RSK smart contracts to track the impact milestones that Wedu has delivered. Now that the data has been uploaded according to the milestones, we are able to log them on chain, making the data unchangeable, showing the individual commitments to the impact made by the enterprises.

Open Source and Challenges

Having experience in participating in other open software projects, this is the first open source project we developed from scratch. As a result, we had to organize internally so as to provide a well organized API, a full set of automated tests, a code of conduct and a guide for new developers who want to set up and collaborate with the project.

As we are releasing our platform as free software we took a considerable amount of time evaluating the right open source license to ensure the tools and frameworks we are releasing to the world will be used to enrich the ecosystem we aim to build.

Blockchain today is still a relatively new technology and there is an enormous gap between users and the understanding behind the concepts. It has been critical for us to understand how to provide value through this technology by building an easy user experience. Our initial focus was developing the algorithm behind the smart contracts to trace and track impact. We however realised very quickly that the greater priority was to ensure in our second version that the user experience was easy and user friendly. With the small wins we have upon learning through the experience, one of the challenges we found - Is that not all enterprises were diligent through the impact tracking process, as it is a time-intensive process and impact entrepreneurs are often time scarce. We will need to improve our ask around making the process of impact monitoring, reporting simpler and less time consuming.

Way Forward

We are looking to work with more individuals and organisations who are keen on finding simpler, more effective ways of tracking the impact of the enterprises you work with. If you have attempted to track your impact and find that you would like a more methodological way of visualising the data, do get in touch! As stewards of capital and enablers of greater impact, we are looking to invite

1) Purpose led enterprises to come on board the platform to grow a new generation of impact driven, creative, humble and bold entrepreneurs.

2) Impact funders and impact companies to come on board the platform to deploy support, funding and to track impact leveraging technology for good.