Year
2020
Country
Qatar
Language
English
Abstract
| Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 is undoubtedly one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century facing both developed and developing countries alike. Since the adoption of the SDGs in 2015, it has been a 5-year journey of trial and error experimentations all over the world to come up with innovative solutions beyond business-as-usual and get the job done. In this paper, we are looking at blockchain beyond the hype. While the technology has a promising potential to trigger disruptive innovations to fulfill the SGDs, it is not mature yet with many gaps in terms of approaches and tools to develop blockchain use cases, monitor and evaluate blockchain experiments, mitigate associated risks and ethical considerations while managing changes within organizations leading blockchain powered platforms. It is only by filing these gaps that blockchain can deliver its promises and may be effectively used as an SDG accelerator. We propose an integrated approach to use blockchain based solutions as SDG accelerators. One of the experimentation areas we are examining is financing for development which remains way below expectations especially in developing countries. Achieving the SDGs cannot be done without securing business financial flows. This is why governments and businesses together are increasingly exploring new ways of attracting impact investments that are capable of generating a wide range of development co-benefits by contributing to one or multiple SDGs. One promising way of doing so, is by scaling-up impact investments using blockchain. If properly used, Blockchain powered platforms can enable impact investing ventures to enhance trust, transparency and accountability while lowering costs and broadening the participation base for impact capital investors through effective disintermediation and decentralization. Impact tokens can be a game-changer in the impact investing marketplace. If their use cases are properly developed, impact tokens have the potential not only to accelerate financial flows for impact investments but also to capture multiple values. In fact, tokens can be used to attribute impact and derive financial value from it, they can also be used as quantified units of impacts for one or several SDGs and to bolster trust and transparency. Nevertheless, it is still too early for impact investing communities to use impact tokens at the scale needed to unlock critical financing for the SDGs. |
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