NFTs for Social Good: A Personal Journey

Transcript

[Music] welcome back to the forest stage at east barcelona i wanted to introduce to you bilal sakhib from tayaba foundation come on up [Applause] hi everyone um raise your hand if you've ever traveled for more than 20 minutes to bring water for your daily use okay

one um you know let's imagine that we wake up in the morning and instead of reaching out to our phone or the coffee machine as the first thing we are asked to go out we are asked to go out and walk for four kilometers five kilometers so that we can bring water um that will that will enable us to survive for that day that will enable us and our family um to drink water to clean to cook um i think for me at least uh until i've you know until i've not been able to go

into these areas it was extremely hard for me to imagine um how difficult this is um but this is reality for millions of people around the world around 1 out of 10 people lack access to safe water around the world and for this water crisis especially women and children they pay the heaviest and the highest price when it comes to water crisis because they are involved with these water fetching activity by 2025 two-thirds of the world's population may be facing uh water shortages and that is not far at all you know that's

just around the corner when we talk about specifically south asia or africa um when it comes to water collection it is mostly women and and children um it is this task is based on upon them um and it is their sole responsibility and they have to go out in the morning and travel three to four kilometers and then in just before sunset as well um so they are able to provide water um for their family and research and and data shows that um when women go out with these

wooden um with this uh wooden uh and uh mud uh clay pots on top of their heads um this carries up to 12 to 13 liters of water it's heavy and this causes a lot of health problems uh data is shown that women get raped school young young children young girls cannot go to school because they are involved and this is a mandatory task for them where we come in is we try to change this with our h2o wheel um

which helps carry up to 40 liters of water uh it's it's a it's a wheel essentially it's an easy drag on so women don't have to go twice a day and bring water in these pots this wheel carries up to 40 litres of water it's an easy drag on it is made out of food gradable plastic which is also recyclable and our third-party impact assessment has shown that this has caused or this has provided several benefits uh economic benefits because of the time that has been saved where women had to go every single day to fetch water now they don't because this carries up to 40 liters of water um it has uh positively impacted um

towards the health because it's just an easy drag on you know it's like instead of us carrying our luggage at the airport on top of our head we just roll it and it doesn't really you know it's it's not taking a toll on our health another thing that this is done is this is redefined sort of gender roles or it is made water fetching more gender neutral where and now men also get involved with water fetching activity because these spots have always been seen as a kitchen item something very feminine where men would not want to get involved and since we are a small organization

where we i think innovation and looking at new things is in the very fabric of what we do we we took a dive into the nfts and we wanted to explore and we became the first ever charity in pakistan to have raised funds using nfts how did we do this i think when you combine nfts arts art and and storytelling it becomes extremely powerful so we were able to launch a separate nft for each of the benefits that are shown by this wheel so we were able to talk about the economic opportunities that

are provided because of this wheel uh gender equality what i've spoken about how is this improving the quality of health and well you know when it comes to water accessibility how school children are being able to go to school more often because they don't have to go and fetch water every single morning so nfts have been a real game changer for us because it has led to a lot of high engagement given us a lot of uh awareness uh a lot of uh it has given us a lot of um exposure uh to to new people uh outside

traditional fundraising uh it has helped us tell every single story uh in the form of an nft um our first collection was more inclined towards narrative building and being able to tell people in pakistan what nfts are what our vision with nfts is that we want to use nfts to be able to kind of give more impact information to donors because that is extremely important for social enterprises and ngos to be able to be more transparent we've started an exclusive podcast again to nurture these communities of the nft holders and to be able to provide

real-time tracking information which i'll share with you uh in the next slides so we using our second collection of nfts we are able to give real-time updates on the nft donations uh which people give us we are also able to show who are the people that are being uh benefit uh benefited from these uh nft from these donations um this is a detailed impact report which shows that again you know these wheels are going where who are who who who is these who who are these wheels given to what are the impact areas and individually the lives that are being transformed um because as soon as you

give this wheel to women or a family their life changes immediately because it saves them x number of hours um this is how uh again the portal looks like where they can exactly see what are the number of wheels that are distributed when was the last distribution made and what areas have been uh have been impacted so again nft has been able to give us a network of donors a network of community that was not available before it has definitely enabled us to bring like-minded people together in terms of again donors volunteers who have been able to give us access into different

partnerships and essentially become our ambassadors ambassadors of the cause um and again nurturing this like-minded community has been able to look into other innovative ways where we could uh help these water deprived uh communities um with some other uh social innovation ideas because women in these areas of our artisans um and being able to kind of provide them with capital so they can create some pieces of art which we can then create a reciprocity and give something back to our donors so this is a quick takeaway of how we believe that nfts

help in the social good arena because they do help nurture a community again you know when you donate whether it's funds or your time you are getting something in return in so that has been missing in traditional fundraising where you know you were really able to create this reciprocal approach increase opportunities with the use of blockchain of course more trust and transparency on where your resources are going and with the secondary marketplace of course another new revenue stream for social enterprises in terms of royalties thank you so much

thank you so [Music] you