Kaxan

Firms have observed and replicated talents of indigenous peoples often through products for profit without any benefit to these communities. 

Our solution is a blockchain platform where indigenous communities submit their designs and services to be available to the business community & direct consumers. 

All indigenous talent is eligible for participation. and the business community will be able to offer a proposal for the  designs to the indigenous communities,  there will be voting between the indigenous community, Kaxan platform, agreeing on the proposal done  by the business community for opportunities of collaboration. 

All stages of the process from submission to formal collaboration is recorded by way of transactions in the blockchain for transparency including final contracts. 

Indigenous people represent 5% of the world population, and they embody the 15% of the global population that lives in extreme poverty. They occupy a quarter of the world’s surface area and safeguard 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity.  

To have a more localized view, in Mexico alone, 7 of every 10 indigenous people live in poverty, and 3 out of 10 live in extreme poverty. Only in Latin America, half the indigenous population already lives in urban settings.  

In the last decades many countries and international organization have had social policies that helped to alleviate this poverty, yet they still are alienated due to their languages and cultural differences, those that live in urban areas or remain in their territories still do not have access to basic services, to education and jobs. 

There is an increase in social responsibility initiatives, unfortunately companies often use indigenous designs on their products, without agreement of the indigenous communities, affecting their cultural identity and moreover, they do not receive any funding for jobs, education or housing.

We are looking to help with 2 initiatives,  providing technology and marketing through our blockchain ecommerce platform, starting in Mexico:

1.   We will create a record of indigenous designs, for new designs it will provide provenance, and for known designs it will  be just a medium to have them available.  Through our platform, the communities will be able to offer their designs to multinational companies through an agreement that include a payment for using the design for a specific time-frame for a season collection. The payment can be directed to fund specific projects for the communities, such as housing, agricultural projects, education, technology, etc.

2.    Promoting sustainable tourism experiences done directly by the communities without tourism broker intervention, so the indigenous communities generate a higher income.   Worldwide, the ecotourism represents $263 Billion, with an annual growth of 17%, only in Mexico there were 8.7 Million tourists, in average 1 out of 4 tourists, had an ecotourism experience in 2016. 

To be able to do this, we are looking to work with indigenous communities in Mexico through different entities as cooperatives, nonprofit organizations & government institutions, like Federacion Indígena Empresarial y Comunidades Locales de Mexico (https://cielo.org.mx/), among others.

Our solution is comprised of reaching out to indigenous communities starting in Mexico where one of our team members has networking connections with the indigenous populations, and an ecommerce platform based on blockchain.  

Regarding our blockchain platform, those officially registered with the state in the indigenous community can submit and upload designs or services to our secure platform. 

Those from the business community observe those submissions of designs and go through a quorum or voting phase where they judge and select any submitted design.  

A second and final voting phase is presented where interested business persons can offer collaboration or purchase offers and final contracts are made, and the indigenous communities votes accepting the offer made by businesses.  All transactions from both voting phases to contracts are recorded and transparent in the blockchain. 

We are using Algorand, a relatively new but innovative blockchain technology developed at MIT as our blockchain platform because of its unique features of quorum stages consistent with our model. We are using IPFS in conjunction with Algorand for submissions to be uploaded and visualized by the business community.  We are using note fields attached to transactions for the purposes of providing feedback to the indigenous community by the business community of judges and buyers.  

Our business community consists of those interested in the designs and services of the indigenous communities such as representatives of ecotourism, fashion industry, and curators. While we will start with the indigenous community in Mexico, our model can be generalized to other indigenous communities including those in the USA. 

Consumers of these products and designs will have the transparency of knowing that purchases of authentic goods and services are benefiting indigenous peoples.

The innovative qualities of our solution arises from our use of the platform model which has been used to match an untapped potential for supply and demand for the purposes of addressing the issue of indigenous talent and the piracy of its output by businesses outside of those communities.  

More specifically, we are helping both those in the indigenous communities and those in the business communities to collaborate and commit to transactions transparently for the first time by way of the Algorand blockchain.  

This way end consumers of indigenous talent can know they are buying authentic products and services and helping such communities.  These communities have a higher prevalence of poverty and a lower level of education than the general population.  

Our model helps to alleviate some of these burdens and prevent the exploitation of indigenous talent in the market without undue credit to those communities. 

Our core technology revolves around the Algorand blockchain platform which utilizes a quorum voting system which outputs a transaction that is recorded in the blockchain with transparency for all parties.  

This platform is being used because it is open source and we are using its quorum features to allow the business community to vote on and provide feedback to submissions of designs, products, and services by indigenous community members.  

Additionally, we are using IPFS which allows submissions to be uploaded in a descriptive way for judging and linked to our Algorand platform where the quorums take place.  Algorand was developed and is based at MIT close to where one of our headquarters is in Boston, and they co-hosted an event where we introduced this solution.  

We will use an ecommerce website and hope to develop an App to ease the process of submissions and platform use by all parties. 

Indigenous communities suffer a disproportionately high level of unemployment and poverty.  While in the presence of this fact, many businesses take designs, products, and emulate services normally inhabited within those same communities for profit without credit to those indigenous peoples.  In certain instances, end consumers of these products may even believe that those communities are given credit in some form or compensated when they purchase.  

Our platform allows for a transparent medium where businesses and indigenous talent can be matched and transactions between the parties are recorded.  Businesses can be exposed to indigenous talent and those communities can be exposed to businesses, whereas neither party may have had an opportunity to engage or collaborate with the other.  

The end result is a reduction and elimination of exploiting indigenous talent and providing authentic output to the market with a consenting agreement that will help businesses satisfy consumers' desires for original indigenous products and those communities with economic growth.

We hope to be serving on the scale of hundreds of users for this year and thousands of users in years subsequently after that.  We are using a bootstrapping model for growth and is highly dependent on our partnerships with non-profits and non-government organizations for growth.  We are currently exploring certain indigenous communities through non-profits in Mexico that will help determine projections for the next few years.

Our goals with the next year is to refine our platform and make it user-friendly.  We are networking with potential partners from non-profits working with indigenous communities and those involved with ecotourism and the fashion industry.  

Within the next five years we hope to recruit a community of business leaders interested in working with indigenous talent and have multiple indigenous communities involved with our platform.  By partnering with non-profits we can help distribute our services and educate indigenous community members on using them.

Our barriers include refining our technology to make it user-friendly and provide a front-end GUI and faster back-end process with our platform. 

Our legal barriers include developing contract terms of use for our platform by the users to ensure a fair and reliable tool for them to use in order to match indigenous talent to the business community.  

Our market barriers include scaling our services beyond our initial targets in Mexico to other service industries in other nations.  This includes providing customer service assistance to users of our platform.  

We are hoping to take advantage of local resources in the Boston area to help develop our technology and blockchain model so it can be user friendly.  We will take advantage of pro bono services by legal sources in order to develop contractual terms of use.  

We hope to market and network with larger companies of tourism and recreational services interested in providing experiences for vacationers and tourists.  

We hope to market and attend exhibit halls and trade events to advertise our product to these industries and professionals and business representatives of fashion designs and their markets.

Four people full to part time staff.

We developed and presented our solution to a 2019 blockchain hackathon where we won first prize for social impact.  Our members include experiences from business and MBAs, finance, academia (mathematics), and healthcare service. One of our members has networking connections with indigenous communities in Mexico and non-profits that work with them.  While our experiences are varies, we are all committed to the same mission and goal of providing a social impact and economic growth and opportunities for indigenous peoples. 

We are seeking to partner with both non-profits who are actively engaged with indigenous communities and for profit organizations interested in indigenous talent and the welfare of their communities.  Examples are tourism organizations interested in providing experiences to their customers at locations inhabited by indigenous communities and their culture.  Or non-profits interested in keeping indigenous people in their communities instead of leaving to already crowded cities where they encounter poverty and hardship in the pursuit of opportunities.  

Our business model is a platform that matches indigenous talent with interested business participants from various industries spanning from tourism, fashion design, and curators.  Our beneficiaries are indigenous communities registered by the state or governing authorities who are interested in opportunities where they can sell experiences, services, and products to the mass market.  The customers of the platform are business individuals interested in observing and judging on those outputs submitted by the indigenous communities as buyers.  Revenue will be provided to the indigenous communities according to contracts or buying offers provided by the business individuals which will be recorded and transparent in the blockchain platform.  Economic growth in indigenous communities will help those living there financially and as an added benefit to remain where they are and alleviate the overcrowding of cities by rural populations.  

We plan on partnering with existing non-profits with missions to help indigenous populations in various areas including financial growth and prosperity.  Within these partnerships we hope to advertise our services and obtain financial donations and grants to refine and scale our business.  We will charge a fee for business individuals to participate and transact within the platform in order to sustain the business.

We learned about MIT Solve and its mission through the hosts of the Blockchain hackathon we won this solution with for social impact.  

After reviewing the mission and objectives of MIT Solve we believe it aligned with our purpose of aiding indigenous people.  

Our solution not only provides economic opportunity for indigenous people but also assists with overcrowding of cities by helping indigenous members to remain in their communities and thus helps solve problems with unhealthy cities.  

Furthermore, a significant proportion of indigenous talent and products are provided by women and girls who can become autonomous and financially independent with our solution.  

MIT Solve can provide a publicity and potential partners interested in our solution.

The types of organizations we would be interested to partner with include:           

-non-profits associated with indigenous communities.  These non-profits or non-government organizations would assist in our efforts to educate members of the indigenous community with our platform and the benefits they achieve by using it.  

- Tourism and fashion industry organizations,   who would find the value in participating in our process where authenticity and tracking original indigenous talent can be traced and transactions made with transparency.  This would span industry across apparel, home goods, and experiences for tourism. 

While blockchain technology is used to store encrypted data we believe that when incorporated with artificial intelligence our platform can provide a more effective service to our beneficiaries and customers.  

Artificial intelligence can be used to match submissions by indigenous talent to interested business parties with a preference for their products.  

It can be used to enhance capabilities of our platform to standardize revenue models for indigenous communities to observe and study in order to better understand the benefits of our service with faster computations.

We would use the GM Prize for the purposes of providing upwards mobility for indigenous community members which in many regions are underrepresented minorities.  Our solution will allow these community members to remain in their communities and still prosper without having to travel to cities to do so.  They would use their existing talents through their designs, products, and services and cultural heritage to collaborate and work with business partners and leaders in a transparent manner promoting economic growth and prosperity.  The GM prize would be used to help refine our software platform to make it more user friendly for indigenous communities and minorities many of whom many not be familiar with our type of platform.    

Women and girls in indigenous communities are paid even less for their work than their sisters in urban and semi-urban settings.  Even within cities the likelihood for some of the widest pay gaps affect indigenous women and girls disproportionately.  Furthermore, indigenous women and girls are more likely to suffer in poverty and experience hardships including victims of violence and other transgressions than the general population.  Also true is that indigenous women and girls are the producers of some of the most popular and impressive products, designs, and cultural motifs and rituals in society.  Our solution will help these individuals promote and submit their unique talents to the business world in a transparent manner so that they can benefit from skills they already have.  Our solution will ensure transparent collaborations that will eliminate potential for exploiting these individuals' works and products that currently happens regularly by profiteers.  We are excited to expose the truest entrepreneur and skills of these women and girls to the mainstream while giving them increased autonomy over their lives.  We will use the prize specifically to educate women and girls on our platform and work with organizations interested in promoting upward social mobility for women and girls to distribute our tools to them in way of computers or other internet-enabled devices.

The solution we propose will help with refugees because refugees oftentimes are displaced from their home communities where they produce and create traditional products and designs to areas where those products may not be present.  Our solution will allow refugees to use their existing skills and crafts that they may have made and brought with them to their new localities and expose them to the broader business community.  This exposure will allow refugees to find and transact with business leaders in a way where they are not exploited and is transparent and can utilize their skill sets to obtain financial freedom and inclusion into their new places of residence.  We will use our prize money to work with non-profits actively engaged with refugees and provide the hardware and education for them to explore the opportunities of business that have remained untapped up to now.

Our solution for indigenous and other underrepresented people in the business and technology realms of society will be both disruptive and differential in its impact.  We have a solution so that with blockchain technology we can create a transparent and user-friendly realm for many of whom have great talents for unique designs and products to prosper.  We would use the Innospark Ventures Prize to incorporate artificial intelligence into our technology in order to make our platform more effective in matching beneficiaries and their products and customers or buyers and their preferences faster and with enhanced accuracy.

Kaxan is a platform that will transform lives of those in our society who are underrepresented and simultaneously suffer from poverty or low-income and disproportionately suffer from wide pay gaps.  Kaxan designed to help those in the indigenous communities, is an environment where its users can utilize their own existing skills and talents to collaborate with and transact deals transparently with business leaders.  These leaders include those in the fashion industry, tourism, and other services.  We use blockchain and specifically Algorand to introduce this environment to these individuals and help with social and financial mobility to reduce the gap between the poorest in our communities and raise their standard of living.  Our platform also benefits cities because users can remain in rural or semi-rural regions while obtaining revenues from their skills and thus reduces migrations to over-crowded cities.