The UNICEF Innovation Fund has announced its first investment into a South African startup called Amply, which leverages blockchain technology to better manage early childhood development services.

Founded on the IXO blockchain protocol, Amply is a UNICEF-backed application that is creating a universal shared ledger for impact data. Early child development (ECD) centers can record and validate pre-school attendance claims. The government of South Africa is then able to exchange these claims with subsidies, which create accountability and makes the funding process more transparent.

Based in Switzerland, the IXO blockchain is a project that is building the needed technology for the impact investment space. Its technology is meant to scale impact measurement as well as allow for the invention of digital assets known as Impact Tokens that are supported by verified impact data.

The Amply Platform

The Amply system enables every child to have a mobile digital identity that verifies their existence, records the history of their education and enables them to receive the benefits that they deserve. Known as the digital identity protocol, the system is already changing the way pre-school children are registered in South Africa.

The system has been built in such a way that it stores the digital identity and personal details of each individual child privately allowing only for the child or their parent to have control. Since the pilot was launched in 2016, about 85 ECD centers have recorded over 61,000 digital attendance, especially in the Western Cape region. Pre-school teachers, through a verifiable claim format, are now able to collect data on attendance through the mobile application developed by Amply, as part of a pilot project. The verifiable claim format is a systematised template that allows for the exchange and use of information across datastores, which helps break down information silos between various stakeholders. The validated attendance claim is then tokenised as a digital asset that a given ECD center can exchange for subsidy grant funding from the government.

According to TechBullion, the digital data captured by Amply has metadata – location, date and time of collection – that has a mathematical proof marking that proves the claim comes from a given origin. This way, the data has a built-in error checking that makes it possible for an external authority to validate the entry without the need to know what is contained in the data. The mathematical proof tied to the metadata is free from any tampering.

In most ECD centers today, teachers are forced to use a paper-based system that cannot be verified. As such, the centers are forced to submit lengthy attendance reports whenever they need to claim subsidies for the services rendered to the Department of Social Development. The government is, therefore, forced to spend a massive amount of time in auditing the attendance reports which makes it a long and expensive process. Besides, stakeholders such as NGOs, ECD centers, the government and other institutions are unable to utilise the information available in the analog reports to come up with comprehensive analytics and program optimisations.

However, with the availability of the global data ledger by Amply, all stakeholders can now have access to crucial information such as where and how the services are being delivered which will help them to plan better and allocate resources. Besides, the data ledger has brought about increased trust in the funding ecosystem which has resulted in increased funding for needy children while saving the administration money and time.

While education is the main focus for Amply at the moment, there is excitement for potential applications that will tackle access to government subsidies, healthcare, food and other goods and services sector. Data collected via Amply has the potential to help improve the consistency and quality of services that South Africans receive. And for Amply, it is just the beginning as they are looking to expand to more schools in the country to help the more than 3.5 million children that are currently not receiving pre-school education.