Complementary Currencies for Humanitarian Aid

Laura Ebert, Georgina Gómez, Will Ruddick and Leanne Ussher will give a presentation based on their recent paper 'Complementary Currencies for Humanitarian Aid', followed by questions and discussion.

The humanitarian sector has gone through a major shift toward injection of cash into vulnerable communities as its core modality. On this trajectory toward direct currency injection, something new has happened: namely the empowerment of communities to create their own complementary currencies (CC).

CCs can be used alongside Cash and Voucher Assistance (CVA) programs to mobilize different actors working towards collective action, building a network that is more resilient and less vulnerable to crises. CC are superior in localizing, decentralizing and democratizing aid in support of collective needs. CCs act as a “binding agent” to call forth and enlist “hidden, scattered, or badly utilized” resources for development purposes, connecting economic units with different capabilities or inputs and diversifying outputs to meet new needs of other entrepreneurs.

Our paper discusses CCs in the context of humanitarian and development aid, taking the Sarafu, a blockchain community inclusive currency in Kenya, as our case study. Since their first pilot in 2010, Grassroots Economics (GE) foundation has operated on a hybrid CC design located in between a pure mutual credit and a freely convertible CC.

We mapped the transaction histories from 2018 to 2021, recorded on the blockchain and visualize the density of the CC network. We argue that the humanitarian aid community should study the opportunities that the CC aid modality offers, in combination with their sister CVAs. The use of a CC system is less about giving aid to individuals, and more about empowering communities, mobilizing their existing resources, and building new productive capacities through collective action. In this way donor funds can support local economic development and offer a pathway to independence from aid.

Please join us for what promises to be another excellent event on some fascinating and impactful work.

The full paper is here, and there are are excellent interviews with Shaila Agha and Will Ruddick about Sarafu and Grassroots Economics that provide some useful background. Further information is also available on GE's website.

Update: here is the Zoom link!