The Rohingya Project

Muhammad Noor is a leading Rohingya visionary and activist, founder and managing director of the Rohingya Project, a Blockchain-based organization to bring financial and social inclusion to stateless people. Noor is also founder and director for several institutions such as the world first Rohingya TV broadcast station, Rohingya Vision (RVISION), watched by hundreds of thousands of Rohingya all over the world. He is the Founder and Chairman of Rohingya Football Club (RFC), the first Rohingya National Team to play in the CONIFA World Cup. 

Noor led the digitization of the Rohingya alphabet and developed the first computer typeface which was accepted and released by Unicode in 2018. He holds an Honors Degree in Computing from the University of Greenwich, UK and an Advanced Diploma in Computer Science from Cambridge University, UK.

For over 30 years, Rohingya have lived in a limbo of statelessness after being driven out of their ancestral land. As a result of their stateless condition, the 3.5 million Rohingya live as an invisible people on the margins, and are vulnerable to destitution, human trafficking, and other maladies. Many second and third generation stateless Rohingya live a shadow existence in their host societies and encounter significant obstacles in generating a livelihood and keeping themselves out of poverty.

Through the creation of a Financial and Social Inclusion platform, those Rohingya who for years have been sidelined can be given access to a range of virtual services including online education, digital identity and reward tokens. The platform will tap into potential of the Rohingya community and other marginalized people and offer options to counter their exclusion from the mainstream.

As defined by Article 1 of the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, a “stateless person” is someone who is not classified as a national by any state under its law. Being stateless means essentially lacking the basic elements of identity that we take for granted in our everyday life. These include a passport to travel, or a national identity card to open a bank account. They also include a birth certificate to prove that your son or daughter is actually your son or daughter. The vast majority of diaspora Rohingya lack these instruments of identification. Simple tasks become arduously difficult, and yet this is the reality for nearly three millions of us.

Statelessness has become an unending limbo. It is to be denied the most fundamental rights that should be granted to all at birth. It is to remain invisible and undocumented, and prey to all sorts of black markets and illegal trafficking. It is be purposefully excluded from the rest of humanity, and remain at the margins of societies in homelands that are not our own.

The Rohingya Project is founded on a vision of creating a digital ecosystem which Rohingya can use to expand the range of financial and social inclusion options available to them in their host societies.

The Rohingya Project is not aiming for a tech utopia in which all Rohingya can become digital citizens and replace the difficulties in their lives with virtual options. Rather, it looks to give Rohingya, especially the younger generation, an easy access point to resources, some of which are offered locally and others transnationally. This starts with a downloadable e-wallet, given that most stateless Rohingya still possess smartphones. The e-wallet will host native and third party apps offering services including digital assets, online education and crowdfunding.

This has been much international uproar over the recent round of persecution in Rakhine since the middle of 2017. Yet this is nothing new for the Rohingya. Over the past several decades, and in particular over the past five years, such violence has become almost a routine spectacle for our people. What has received significantly less attention over this time, though, is the condition our people face in between these outbreaks of repression. The world knows well the Rohingya as victims of conflict, but they know far less of what hardships the Rohingya experience as a stateless people.

Against this bleak backdrop, it may be easy to give in to despair. Yet it is precisely because of the struggle, because of the tantalizing hope that states and institutions will bring about some revival of the Rohingya, that an initiative has arisen which investigates the potential of technology to change their fate. The Rohingya Project is a grassroots effort originating from the Rohingya community that seeks to employ blockchain technology to address their stateless situation.

This issue of identity has long been one that has troubled Muhammad Noor. He is one of those rare Rohingya who managed to escape his stateless beginnings and get an education and career. With a background in IT, his passion is developing innovation solutions that can address the Rohingya crisis.

When the violence against the Rohingya erupted in 2012, Noor founded the first Rohingya satellite television station to offer primary reporting on the human rights crimes happening on the ground in Rakhine. 

But the issues of identity and exclusion remain the most pressing in the long run. The initial idea of exploring blockchain to address these problems came through connecting with a Malaysian-based equity crowdfunding agency in mid-2017. The idea gained momentum and in December 2017, the Rohingya Project was launched in Kuala Lumpur. 

As co-founder, Noor’s goal was for the Rohingya Project to work towards building an economic foundation for his people. The Project stated that the initiative would grant a digital identity to allow Rohingya to access a range of financial solutions on a dedicated platform.

As one of the Rohingya, I can say that each passing year seems to be a step back in time for us. In the past 35 years, we have gone from a people with a sense of belonging and security in our homeland, to a people who are now called ‘the world’s most persecuted minority’. Whereas once we were a thriving culture, now we have been effectively disowned by our own state and scattered to the four corners of the Earth. The passage of each year is now a reminder of how our collective dignity is becoming a distant memory.

- Noor

I have a long-standing service for my community through several grassroots projects as well as large community diaspora network in Bangladesh, Malaysia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Blockchain is increasingly noted as the next logical step to e-governance, but a chasm separates the Rohingya from the rest of the world. There is no magic solution to the humanitarian disaster at present, and without some intervention the decades to come look no less grim.

Muhammad Noor was born as a stateless Rohingya in Saudi Arabia and received no early formal education and was undocumented. His escape from the limbo of statelessness to chart his own path is a rare untold story of the Rohingya and a testament to the indomitability of the human spirit.  Noor battled to receive a basic education and even survived a stay in a hellish detention center in Saudi Arabia due to lack of documentation. From here, he built his own foundation slowly and surely to serve his people. 

When the 2012 genocide campaign in Myanmar occurred, Noor took a leadership role by setting up Rohingya Vision to allow for firsthand reporting of human rights abuses on the ground and for the international media attention to be paid to the Rohingya plight. Noor mobilized the Rohingya diaspora to send 80,000 mobile phones to the Rakhine area to allow the locals to report on abuses by the Burmese military.

Blockchain is increasingly noted as the next logical step to e-governance, but a chasm separates the Rohingya from the rest of the world. There is no magic solution to the humanitarian disaster at present, and without some intervention the decades to come look no less grim.

Currently we are serving over 500 Rohingya within the diaspora community in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We plan to expand this to over 1,000 by end of 2021.

Our goal within the next five years is to expand this network to over 10,000 in Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh and Malaysia. 

• To create a digital ecosystem to uplift and empower the stateless Rohingya in diaspora both economically and socially
• To achieve a number of UN Sustainable Development Goals related to poverty eradication, social marginalisation and others sustainability within the Rohingya community
• To come up with a strong Proof of Concept for community empowerment that can be shared with other stateless and marginalised people

We currently face restrictions in terms of overcoming logistic barriers in ensuring the progress implementation in a multi-country context as well as funding to accelerate the project. 

We are building our ecosystem to incorporate a transnational investor model and build a broad network of international grassroots partners. 

Since its inception, the Rohingya Project has built an impressive list of partners and advisors, from blockchain technology firms to UN agencies and international universities. These partners are critical in providing the project infrastructure support and advisory on data privacy/protocols as the project seeks to lay the groundwork for a series of pilot projects showcasing the empowerment potential of blockchain.These include:

- University of Washington

- National University of Singapore

- UCLA

- UNHCR

- UNDP

The digital inclusion platform offers a range of services based on three broad categories: proof of identity, social upliftment and financial inclusion.

• Proof of identity includes basic user registration & verification, blockchain-based digital identity and user privacy with data protection protocols.
• Financial inclusion services include crowd funding and project empowerment applications and use of the R-Coin, a social capital community token and earning reward through different services.
• Social upliftment includes services such as cultural documentation archiving, online education classes and health services and insurance.

User can access the platform through a downloadable e-wallet using smart phone hosting a number of services including our partner applications catering to the unique social and financial needs of the Rohingya. 

The future onboarding will allow for small user subscription fees and token monetization. Users will be able to receive regular promotional offers, services and discounts by the individual hosted service providers which will also provide revenue generation opportunities.

The Rohingya Project was the winner of UNHCR's Community Connectivity Fund in 2019 for our pilot social token project called the R-Coin.

Yes, we are seeking funding for building and expanding the platform infrastructure as well as marketing and human resources to have the capacity for large scale onboarding. We are seeking to raise USD325,000 by the end of 2021 through grant and investments. 

Currently, our estimated expenses in 2020 are USD35,000 for digital infrastructure and development of the platform.