Refuges around the world will receive OmiseGo tokens worth one million dollars, thanks to the teams of OmiseGo, GiveDirectly and Vitalik Buterin. The funds will be used to improve the quality of life of the refugees and will be delivered to them without intermediaries.
The donation in OmiseGo tokens is equivalent to one million US dollars and will be distributed among the refugees that do not have enough resources to provide for themselves. According to the official blog of OmiseGo, GiveDirectly, an organization that makes direct money transfers to people with insufficient resources, will be in charge of distributing the donation to the beneficiaries. Their website says: “We use rigorous experimental research (randomized controlled trials) to measure our impact and answer public policy questions. Based on historical averages, we expect to put 88.4% of your donation into the hands of a recipient in East Africa.”
On the other hand, OmiseGo said the following: “They are precisely the people we wish to see benefiting from the “unbanking” effect that OMG is designed to create. We’re excited to plug them back in, transfer funds, and let them get to work.”
Currently, the world is in a refugee crisis with more than 65 million people who left their homes, says OmiseGo in the blog post. Some of these people are able to start a new life and legally contribute to the society, but generally, they do not have the necessary resources to do so. OmiseGo is trying to help them, as part of a bigger project whose goal is to eliminate all the intermediaries in the distribution of charity.
Catherine Dao, the Head of Communications at GiveDirectly said: “This is a major new chapter for us, entering the humanitarian space with a service to give money directly to refugees. While cash transfers have been used in humanitarian contexts before, this initiative is a significant departure from the status quo because we’re giving families transformative amounts of money versus small, subsistence amounts.”
According to the information published by OmiseGo, a large part of the donation of one million dollars came from Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, who announced last September he would donate to charity the money earned from his advisory activities to OmiseGo and Kyber Network. Buterin published a tweet on his official Twitter account saying he was excited to take part in this new project.
This initiative is part of a project to create a decentralized world with more freedom by achieving the financial sovereignty that derives from the disintermediation provided by the blockchain technology. The project will be realized with the goal of creating a system that selects intermediaries that add value instead of simply take the profit: “Specifically, the OMG team is working to decentralize the means to own and wield purchasing power by creating a disintermediated system for storing, transferring and exchanging assets. These financial tools do not require users to go through centralized networks, which often put up barriers and impose unnecessary costs.”
This initiative comes from the high earnings made by people and organizations involved in the blockchain world. OmiseGo is hoping to inspire these people and organizations to use this money for generous purposes and not for extravagant lifestyles. This is why Jun Hasegawa, the founder of OmiseGo, invited anyone who is interested in helping to join this project by donating: “This is an open effort, and anyone is welcome to support it by sending contributions of ETH or ERC20 tokens to GiveDirectly’s Ethereum address.”
