Karen is an American investigative journalist with a global news org researching into election from the deep hinterland of Zimbabwe. She needs some pictures to complete her feature scheduled to go to print the next week. She tries to get a visa, but could not due to the short time. Through an app, she’s able to get someone take hi-res pictures for the project. In 2 days, no need to fly down anymore.

An Asian conglomerate needs price data of some fast moving consumer goods in Northern Nigeria — and in 2 hours are able to piece a team together who gets all these prices.

Chike lives in the urban city of Lagos, Nigeria and needs to send some money to his great aunt who lives in a village where there are no banks or ATMs. All she needed to do was go to a nearby mobile money agent to collect the cash.

These three stories and more highlights the importance of an on-demand workforce who can get stuff done anytime anywhere.

Crowdforce is building the largest offline on-demand manpower force for Africa, made possible using blockchain technology.

Why is this important? Without manpower, some tasks are simply impossible or hard to achieve remotely. You need boots on the ground, that’s it. The team at Crowdforce have found a way to make this available as a service where anyone can work with agents on the platform, deploy, transact and monitor results — all made possible by the many benefits of blockchain technology including traceability, reduced costs, proof of work consensus mechanisms and scalability.

Crowdforce has already deployed 100k+ agents for market research, election monitoring, data collation, payment and digital services and its set to be the biggest offline workforce in Africa. The value here is obvious — you can sit in Hangzhou and get pictures of a house in Nairobi, Kenya or aggregate prices from a market in Lagos, Nigeria. International non-profits and agencies have jumped on board using Crowdforce to get data in hard-to-reach areas. Election data and sentiments is even being collated!

Not to forget, that this is empowerment and employment at scale for those on the field — who earn extra money on this part-time jobs using just a phone.

I’ve always looked out for real life common-sense use cases for blockchain tech and this is one of the best out there. I’ve known the founding team for more than 15 years now and I’m undoubtedly sure they can pull this off.

I look forward to interesting times for Africa, its friends and enemies as Crowdforce unleashes its force upon us.