Kotani Pay Selected to Participate in Funding Pilot by Gitcoin and UNICEF

Kenyan blockchain startup, Kotani Pay, is 1 out of 10 organizations that will be participating in a pilot community funding round organized by Gitcoin and UNICEF.

“Gitcoin will facilitate a Quadratic Funding grants round for a select group of 10 impact-focused, innovative projects from around the world – including Nepal, Kenya, Argentina, Brazil, and the Philippines.” – GITCOIN

UNICEF’s Office of Innovation is one of 5 design partners helping to test and refine the grants protocol.

Besides being a platform where coders and developers can get paid to work on open-source software in a wide variety of programming languages, Gitcoin also lets users submit their own project ideas (grants) to crowdsource funding from contributing donors.

On Gitcoin, donations from individuals are matched with corresponding amounts of funding from larger pools of funds supplied by bigger donors. However, Gitcoin’s system seeks to reward popular projects the most such that if a grant receives 100 individual donations of $1, it would receive more in matched funds than a grant that received one donation of $100.

Gitcoin is using this round of funding to test its new grants protocol and this signals the beginning of Gitcoin’s transition to a decentralized protocol that will allow any community to coordinate its own grants funding round.

“We are excited to announce our collaboration with UNICEF’s Office of Innovation. It’s our first foray into grants allocation beyond Web3, and we feel it signals the real-life potential and interest in bottom-up, transparent funding allocation. We intend to scale this novel tech to support communities all over the world.” – Azeem Khan, Gitcoin Head of Partnerships.

Selected financial access projects in the trial include:

• Kotani Pay (Kenya)
• Rumsan (Nepal)
• Treejer (Iran)
• Xcapit (Argentina)

All the above projects are using blockchain technology to increase access to financial tools in undeserved communities.

Projects nominated for the round address gaps in financial access, education and literacy, environment, and public health.

All the projects included in the round have strong track records of success. Many are certified digital public goods, hackathon winners, and recipients of investments from top firms, including the UNICEF Venture Fund. They have also run successful pilot programs with organizations such as UNICEF’s offices in Guatemala and Nepal, the World Food Programme, and Mercy Corps Ventures.

The round opens from December 9 to 16, and anyone can go on Gitcoin to donate to any of these projects. Donors also stand a chance to receive one of 5 Alpha Round POAPs (which are digital proofs of participation). Ff you bag the whole collection, you get to win VIP access to Schelling Point at ETH Denver.

About Gitcoin’s Grants Protocol


Gitcoin exists to empower communities to fund their shared needs.

Grants protocol is a new way of distributing funds within a community. It is Gitcoin’s vision for the future of funding: not a platform nor an isolated fund, but a protocol that any community can use anywhere in the world that connects resources, contributors, and ecosystems in the most optimal way possible.

Grants protocol uses blockchain to make it easier for organizations to identify and incorporate community signals into funding decisions. It also makes it easier for communities to see where funds are distributed in the most transparent way possible.

As Gitcoin evolves, the grants protocol (currently in closed beta) is Gitcoin’s vision for the future of community-driven funding. The grants protocol is not a platform, nor an isolated fund, but permissionless technology that anyone can use, from anywhere in the world, to empower their community members to coordinate funding for projects that address their shared needs.

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