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The UNICEF Venture Fund wants to invest up to $100,000 in blockchain startups from across the world. It’s calling on early-stage companies in this niche to apply for this funding opportunity.

Read more about Opportunities
This potential investment from the UNICEF Innovation Fund seeks to support blockchain solutions that are designed to solve problems in a variety of categories, including youth, climate change, learning, and humanitarian portfolios.

The funding from this program will be in Bitcoin or Ether and made available through the organization’s recently launched CryptoFund. It will be delivered to startups with solutions that improve accountability and service delivery, empower and actively engaged young people, and improve equity in access to connectivity.

This investment opportunity is made possible by the UNICEF Venture Fund, in collaboration with Giga, a global initiative aimed at connecting every school to the internet and every young person to useful information.

Benefits

Startups selected to be funded by the organizers of this program will benefit from it in the following ways:

  • Receive funding worth up to $100,000 (equity-free investment).
  • Receive publicity from the organizers, their partners, and the media at large.
  • Get the financial support they need to scale their solutions (whether they are developing new technology, improving or expanding existing ones, or developing new use cases for existing technology).

Eligibility

Startups applying for this opportunity are expected to meet these conditions:

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  • Must be registered as a private company in a UNICEF program country.
  • Must be working on open source technology or be willing to be open-source, under the following licenses or their equivalent:
  1. For hardware, a CERN license.
  2. For software, a BSD license.
  3. For design or content, a CC-BY license.
  4. Should have an existing prototype of the open-source solution; previous pilots must have shown promising results.
  • The solution must be generating publicly exposed and measurable real-time data.
  • It should be able to positively impact the lives of vulnerable children.

The Lead-Up To The Investment

Blockchain startups interested in this opportunity should apply on the Fund’s website (where they are expected to submit the documents requested in the form).

The Innovation Fund will evaluate the applications it receives and come up with a shortlist of candidates. It will invite the shortlisted startups to submit a detailed proposal. The proposals submitted will be reviewed, and finalists will be selected.

The finalists will be invited to an online demo event, in which they will be interviewed for 30 minutes by representatives of the Innovation Fund. A final investment decision will be made after the finalists’ applications, proposals and interviews have been assessed. The Fund will notify companies that it has chosen to invest in.

The deadline for applications is March 8, 2022.

To find out more about the UNICEF Innovation Fund’s investment opportunity for blockchain startups, click here.

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This article was first published on 23rd February 2022

ikenna-nwachukwu

Ikenna Nwachukwu holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He loves to look at the world through multiple lenses- economic, political, religious and philosophical- and to write about what he observes in a witty, yet reflective style.

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