Could the IMF and Commercial banks learn from women in rural Kenya how to create a decentralized and de-risked (transparently 100% backed) credit system?

This shows us that the presence of Sarafu stabilizes the economic system, working as a buffer in the months when the national currency is scarce.

These may sound like small improvements, but because of them our current, 8000+ and growing, users will be able to trade and create CICs to support their local communities across Kenya. CICs allow users to easily create shares of pooled funds in national currency as a...

How do you have a proper checkers tournament when no one can pay the entry fees?

Jacob the organizer saw an opportunity. His neighbors in several rural villages are in the worst time of the year because of the scarcity of Kenyan Shillings. Instead of shillings they are...

While Community Inclusion Currencies (CICs) have been shown to increase local trade they can also be a vehicle for collective share holding and impact investment. A large portfolio of CICs could represent millions of dollars of investment while the circulation of the C...

With every transaction being logged anonymously on a public blockchain we have unprecedented insight into what living below the poverty line means in rural and urban Kenya.

All the anonymous data from 2019 is freely available on github: with 92,223 transaction...

The reserve behind these tokens, the actual aid funding, was about $2.5k USD). This means that $2,500 USD of Aid funds created 10,000 tokens (CICs) which were treated as shares and given a value of $10,000 USD – which was used to facilitate $50,000 USD of trade – this...

By exploring this space and enabling leverage we can open the door to truly decentralized financial services. If credit can be safely issued by the people using that credit, we can truly change our world.

Rarely in development work do you see an intervention that sprouts its own two legs and starts running across the country without donor funds.

Sarafu stands at the fore-front of digital community currencies offering novel ways to learn about the inner workings of local exchange systems and study their impact hands-on.