Gustav Strömfelt is Project Manager at the World Food Programme & New Venture Consultant. In this exciting podcast we discuss some of the blockchain work the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has been conducting over the years including Building Blocks and collaborations with other UN agencies such as UN Women.

 
Winning the Nobel Peace Prize

Winning the Nobel Peace Prize represents for Gustav an important spotlight on the importance that food has towards global peace.

Awarding the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize to WFP, the Norwegian Nobel Committee described the link between hunger and armed conflict as a vicious circle in which “war and conflict can cause food insecurity and hunger, just as hunger and food insecurity can cause latent conflicts to flare up and trigger the use of violence.”

The Nobel Peace Prize gives WFP recognition “for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.”

Gustav feels very humble and proud to be part of an organisation of 18,000 people, their partners and donors who all work together to ensure that the 690 million people who are hungry worldwide do not go to bed worrying about where they’re going to get their next meal.

 
What is blockchain?
A its core, blockchain is a fancy accounting technology with some interesting bells and whistles. From his perspective, Gustav sees blockchain as an amazing way to ensure a unified vision of the truth across participants in an ecosystem. This creates the opportunity for consensus to be shared between organisations that’s effectively coded into an underlying platform.

From an application standpoint it opens huge opportunities for collaboration and cooperation for use cases that considers the needs of an ecosystem and a common customer. Whether that’s a specific good that’s passing through a supply chain or an individual receiving tokens.

Blockchain is a great way for the WFP to drive transparency, consensus and a unified vision of the truth.

 
About the World Food Programme (WFP)

Created in 1961, the WFP’s purpose is to eradicate global hunger because one in 11 people worldwide doesn’t have enough to eat.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is one of the largest UN agency with 18,000 employees serving 138 million people worldwide across 83 countries. Every year the WFP gives out 15 billion food rations and $30m in cash. At the moment the WFP is probably one of the largest operating airlines in the world with over 100 aircraft along with 30 ships, 5,500 trucks actively moving goods and people to deliver humanitarian responses around the world.

 
The World Food Programmes Building Blocks

Houman Haddad, is the founder of the WFP’s Building Blocks which launched in 2017 as part of their Blockchain for Zero Hunger initiative.

What Houman realised was how inefficient cash transactions are from the creation of beneficiaries accounts to the way transaction are performed.

The majority of cash delivery processes in humanitarian organisation...