– CASESTUDY –
CASE STUDY 1: Sponsoring a girl’s education in India
Saloni is a bright little girl, but her family are poor and cannot afford the fees to send her to school. The Giftcoin community agree to support the family with the school fees and send donations in Giftcoin. As the funds are specifically restricted to pay the local school fees, the community has complete confidence that donation is used as intended.
Each time the school fees are paid, the donors receive an alert, building their trust and engagement in the project. In addition, the simplicity of the transaction and the absence of wire transfer fees ensure that Saloni’s family can keep 100% of the donation to pay for the school fees.
Hello, I have some questions.... Do you send the 'donation' to Saloni's family or directly to the school. How do you know Saloni's father doesn't use the money to buy a bottle of his local hooch every night? Please provide further information! I am very interested in this project. Devs, please also feel free to PM and get in touch if you are genuinely interested in building something long term and positive.
Every indicator shows that encouraging girls education helps a number of different goals - better educted girls marry later, have reduced infant mortality and better health outcomes, are more likely to found businesses outside the home, etc.
So we believe verifying Saloni receiving her education is the primary goal and has known secondary positive effects.
Being able to ensure that the donation is not spent on alcohol, tobacco, etc is harder to do for several reasons:
1. The main aim of many charitable projects is to reduce dependency. Part of that is trusting people to make their own decisions rather than trying to direct them too much.
2. From a technical perspective, it will take time to build enough of a network effect for retailers to even accept Giftcoin as payment.
3. Donating restricted-use tokens may well be less effective than unrestricted cash, as the recipients may not want them or value them as highly as cash. This can result in a secondary market for the restricted-use tokens, where they trade for cash at a discount, or other negative effects. This effect has been known and documented since at least the 1930s (it features in Orwell's "The Road To Wigan Pier" among other places).
