The UN Development Programme is moving its blockchain payment work past the testing phase. After running pilots in five countries, the agency signed a new deal with the Stellar Development Foundation to expand the tech across more programs.
The pilots ran for 16 months across Haiti, Syria, Kenya, Guatemala, and The Gambia, plus extra projects in Colombia and Papua New Guinea. Results were concrete. In Syria, a Cash for Work program that logged payments onchain cut distribution costs from 10% to 2%. In Haiti, payments kept flowing even during a cell network outage.
Blockchain payment networks — especially ones running stablecoins — have been getting more attention as a way to move money across borders, particularly in places where traditional banking barely reaches. This is one of the clearest signs yet of a UN agency moving past small blockchain experiments into real-world use for humanitarian work.
Last month, UNDP also launched a Blockchain Advisory Group at the Proof of Talk conference in Paris to help guide broader blockchain use across development programs. The group will look beyond payments into digital public infrastructure and public systems.
This fits a bigger trend. Ripple recently took an equity stake in African fintech Flutterwave to push its RLUSD stablecoin across Africa, where remittances are a big chunk of household income. Latin America is also heating up as a stablecoin remittance market, with issuers targeting Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, and Venezuela. Former UN under-secretary-general Vera Songwe said at the World Economic Forum that stablecoins are becoming “more important than aid” in some developing economies. Her reasoning? About 650 million people in Africa don’t have bank accounts, but many have smartphones. Stablecoins let them save in a currency that won’t get eaten by inflation.
