Sela Labs: Decentralized Project Verification Platform

Platform decentralizing accountability, transparency for development projects by engaging with stakeholders through a conversational interface and managing payments via cryptocurrency.

Millions of people across the globe and especially in the emerging world are subject to extremely sub-optimal conditions due to friction and lack of transparency at various levels of project execution. 

Abandoned projects, mismanaged/diverted funds, and outright theft leave beneficiaries worse off year after year, and in some cases, throwing more people into poverty with each passing minute. What if a solution exists to tracks these transactions from funding to project execution, using local people as monitors and custodians of their own economic development. 

Sela proposes a solution that utilizes the distributed ledger technology with Artificial Intelligence and employing local people as human agents to drive transparency and accountability in economic development activities. This mix of interaction we believe will incentivize behavioural change across various segments of the value chain and improve the rate of project execution while minimizing waste, thereby activating economic development and inclusion for those who hitherto were left behind.

In Niger Delta, the first area where we are working, we’re leveraging the recent adoption of mobile phones to engage with community members through chatbots to get a real time estimate of state of projects accessible through a web dashboard. 

Secondly, we use distributed ledgers to store references to files and also payment information to keep a record of state of projects and create accountability between project funders, communities and contractors. The direct link between communities and project funders was not existing before. And by decentralizing data gathering and using blockchain-based payments we provide a great level of transparency.

Our first use case is an oil cleanup in the Niger Delta. In this case, we have used IPFS and distributed ledgers to pay monitors, store reference of test results on a decentralized file systems, talked with community members through chatbots to make sure the project was ongoing and used biotechnology from University of Florida to cleanup the oil present in the water. We have had a human centered design process first conducting manual tests before best understanding how software could streamline these projects.

The minimum viable product of the Sela platform consisting of a web dashboard, cryptocurrency wallet and chatbot is done and has been tested in mid April 2018 to support a $10k oil spill cleanup.
We have another use case of the platform to support an audit of 4000 projects in partnership with the world bank for the Niger Delta region finalized and are looking to expand in other countries in the next 12 months.

One learning we had from our pilot was that it was necessary to think about including illiterate users in our workflows via voice interface and USSD interface for feature phone users. Cryptocurrency currently has one of the worst user experience in terms of managing private and public keys, storing assets on wallets and we are really interested in making voice-based, user friendly solutions so that even illiterate people and feature phone users can use our platform to both report about project but also manage their tokens. 

Direct communication with customers. We have reached out to executives at the World Bank, Niger Delta Development Commission, USAID and we exposed them to our work. We have a use case of the platform for Fall 2017 to support an audit led by the World Bank of 4000 public projects and are also exploring further use cases.In addition to direct communication, our advisors have been helpful in helping us secure partnerships (check advisors on team website).
Finally, speaking at blockchain, international development conferences (i.e. HBS Africa Conference), hosting global events has also been helpful to meet relevant partners.

The initial project for which the Sela Platform has been used is relevant to cleaning up oil spills for the Goi community in the Niger Delta which includes 60,000 people.

We have currently run pilot projects in the Niger Delta where we empowered local community people economically by engaging them as paid project monitors. We also revived fish farming businesses by cleaning the pollution in the fisheries, thereby boosting the economic viability of the local area. We intend to scale our solution to many more villages in the community.
Impacting millions in the next 1-3 years will go through attracting Shell to use our platform to monitor the cleanups for which they have released a $1billion cleanup fund. 

Our team members currently including 6 full time people and 2 part-time include 2 person with an MBA and are originally from Nigeria. They can close deals, understand the local context. We also have 3 engineers, including 2 from MIT who lead our technology division with expertise in machine learning, blockchain and fullstack web development. In addition, we have 2 designers who focus on the user experience. This team is supported by advisors including CEO of HSB Africa, General Counsel of USAID and senior advisors at the UN impact fund who can serve as advocates in these organizations.

We make money by charging transaction fees of 1.99% for every transaction that goes through the platform. We also charge fees for lead generation and for polling which can be conducted on the platform after achieving critical mass of users. We will also charge fees for consulting and white-labelling the platform for businesses to drive internal processes.

In the long term, we believe that our unique service and value proposition positions us for continued success. Over 5% and as much as 15% of project costs are lost to misappropriation in emerging economies. Our solution eliminates this waste and delivers sustainable value that customers will be willing to pay for in the long term.

We are working on global challenges such as increasing transparency in international development, our first pilot involved cleaning up an oil spill in a rural area of the Niger Delta (K-Dere). We believe that the highly educated and talented people should be focused on this kind of tough, global challenge. The Solve community is one of the rare one which is excited to support and celebrate this kind of work, connect us with capital and key allies to scale our work.

Working with local people, and some who are illiterate creates the need for us to innovate on more effective means of interaction - the need for AI-powered voice interface and we believe that Solve can connect us to the required technology organizations.
Our ideas challenge the status quo and being part of a community such as Solve can bring more visibility and credibility to our work and enable us to unlock further partnerships.