Shamba Geospatial Data Oracle

Many projects working on ecosystem services, regenerative finance, and other climate solutions in web3 have an aspect of measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) that is usually reliant on geospatial data. However geospatial data is complex to work with especially at the nexus with blockchain technologies. Web3 projects working on ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration and credits are significantly held back by the technical barriers of using geospatial data for MRV. This leads them to explore more costly and less scalable approaches such as ground-based methods. The lack of a dedicated oracle to provide geospatial data and analytics to other applications impedes the entire field of MRV both on the blockchain and off it. It stops local communities around the world from being able to tap into new opportunities such as regenerative finance to improve both the environment and community well-being. 

Shamba is making available an oracle that will provide web3 projects with geospatial data, thereby making it easier for climate solutions to be built on web3. Our oracle frees project development teams from having to build infrastructure to process geospatial data, allowing them to instead outsource that aspect of their application. This not only removes a significant technical barrier to the establishment of new sustainability projects but also promotes innovation in the climate space on web3. The indirect impact of Shamba's oracle will be felt across all continents as Shamba will be supporting ESG projects from all over the world. By building open infrastructure that supports ecosystem-based interventions, Shamba is helping conserve high-carbon ecosystems around the world.

Our solution is meant to indirectly benefit rural marginalized communities struggling with climate change and land degradation. By building our infrastructure and supporting projects working on local ecosystems with technical information, we empower new approaches to dealing with the aforementioned challenges. Communities are able to leverage the variety of protocols built around the Shamba oracle to access a variety of financial services geared towards conservation. From being able to organize and sell carbon credits at a community level to being able to buy parametric crop insurance to hedge against climate risks, our solution opens up an entire gallery of opportunities to local farming communities. Shamba does not directly provide these services to users, but rather empowers those who do it with the data they need to make such programs work. This means Shamba has the potential to indirectly impact billions of smallholder farmers lives around the worl.

The team at Shamba is composed of experts in the field of geospatial technologies, data science, and software development. Not only do we all have extensive experience working with geospatial data to empower smallholder farming communities, but we all also come from backgrounds tied to smallholder agriculture. We have worked in different international research for development organizations and have a deep understanding of the challenges faced by projects implementing interventions on the ground. As such we are in a strong place to build solutions relevant to the challenges that pervade the space, particularly with regards to data and MRV. We are also experts in blockchain development having won some hackathons and competitions building solutions in the web3 space. The nexus of our skills at the junction of geospatial technology, data science and blockchains gives us an advantage in building out this industry-critical infrastructure. 

We are applying to Solve to get connected to the networks that would help our mission succeed. This covers everything from strategic partners that can help us grow and scale our business, to investor networks that can help us finance the growth of our company. We are also applying in order to join the global Solve community and potentially find great talent that can join us and help build the future of satellite-based MRV of carbon stocks.

Under the business-as-usual scenario, any web3 project focussed on carbon credits would have to build its own geospatial analytics engine in-house. This would be used for MRV (measurement, reporting and verification) all key components of carbon credit schemes. This not only increased the costs of establishing such projects, but it also led to a repetition of efforts since no project was sharing the capacity they built internally. What makes our solution innovative is that we are building public infrastructure that any carbon credit project can tap for MRV. Not only is this more efficient since the usage of the system is maximized, but its also factors cheaper than maintaining in-house teams and infrastructure. The most powerful part of our solution is that it solves a critical bottleneck in the innovation space around carbon credits. By eliminating such a big technical barrier our solution allows relatively low-skill teams to build sophisticated local carbon markets and thus empowers innovation across the board.

Our impact goals revolve around the number of web3 projects we can support to set up carbon and ecological credits using our infrastructure for the data layer. 
We want to onboard at least 60 regenerative finance projects working on carbon sequestration with local communities in different countries. We are already working with web3 projects focussed on mangroves and on rain forests, farmlands, and grasslands. We want to expand on this both in terms of global coverage as well as covering more biomes and ecosystems.

We want to onboard at least 20 parametric insurance projects, particularly those working with smallholder farmers in developing economies. We believe that supporting these projects that provide smallholders with a social safety net can help stem land degradation and depletion of carbon stocks by poor farming communities. By providing the infrastructure to support both environmental and social regeneration our solution will drive sustainable impact.

We are measuring the number of new projects to which we reach out each month with information about our infrastructure.

We also keep a record of the number of projects that we reach a partnership agreement with and decide to work together.

We also monitor the number of projects that we onboard and help to integrate our systems into their application.

Finally, we monitor the number of final users each partner we onboard works with, so we can measure our indirect impact on end-users.

So we are keeping track of our partners' onboarding pipeline works at every stage of the process and the final impact on the end-users of our solution.

Our theory of change is that the alignment of incentives between economic pursuits and environmental regeneration can help secure carbon stocks and promote further sequestration. The rise of web3 projects focussed on regenerative finance holds the promise of aligning these incentives in a way never before possible, particularly for rural farming communities. Information is the critical ingredient to accomplishing this, both for measurement as well as verification of carbon and other ecological credits. By democratizing access to geospatial information, our solution sets the stage for sustainable innovation leading to sustainable change.

There are three core technologies that power our solution. The first is geospatial datasets collected by the likes of NASA and the European Space Agency. The second is data science and analytics where we leverage AI to extract valuable insights from the raw datasets. And the third is blockchain oracle technology which enables us to connect on-chain smart contracts to real-world data sources. These three technologies form the pillars of our solution.

We welcome diversity in our company. The company is founded by an African and has people working on it from Africa, Asia and America. We have partners from all across the globe and work with minorities. In addition women are part of the staff at our company. We embrace diversity in a number of ways.

We are building our solution as an open-source software project. We plan to run a public and permissionless blockchain that will provide data to any party and will be paid for this data in the native token. Token economics will be used to incentive participants in this blockchain, including those running the analytics nodes for the network. Essentially income will be generated by the payments made in return for data by the web3 projects that request data from the oracle network. Tokenomics will be used to incentivize participants' behavior for the benefit of the entire community. 

We are currently pursuing grant funding to support the development and full deployment of our solution. However once this is ready and we have onboarded several customers we should soon start generating revenues to sustain the project and advance its development.

We successfully received a Chainlink grant to develop our MVP in 2021, and have recently participated in a Gitcoin grant to raise funds for further development. We are hoping to raise funds to expand the team and fund projects' onboarding so that we can soon start generating revenues.