QUIPU

60% of the world’s economy is considered informal and ⅓ of the global population lives in slums. Micro-entrepreneurs in this economies lack access to information on goods and services and are limited to word of mouth marketing. Moreover, they also lack access to capital and bank accounts which makes it difficult to plan for the future and guard against economic shocks. 

To address this problem we started Quipu, a digital community marketplace that promotes the development of place-based economies. The Quipu Marketplace visualizes local vendors and customers on a map, connects buyers and sellers in a collaborative trading system and records transactions. Quipu uses the production and consumption data generated from local trade to deliver business insights and establish for the first time, credit worthiness.

At Quipu, we are co-creating an economy that works with people living on the margins. Quipu creates shared wealth revolutionizing low-income financial services. 

Quipu helps develop thriving place-based economies in marginalized communities to increase disposable income and promote community wealth creation. One out of three people on earth live in an informal settlement. These informal settlements, or slums, are home to place-based informal markets that make up 60% of the global economy. 

Although the significant majority of the population we are addressing is unbanked, low-income communities have resilient social bonds and identity, high capacity for entrepreneurship and innovation, and a high offer and demand for goods and services. 

However, they remain economically stagnant for these main reasons:

During times of financial downturn, money no longer functions as a liquid utility. This means that slum residents lose financial access to basic necessities and local businesses are unable to sell their products. 

Transactions between buyers and sellers are largely unrecorded, which limits business management skills, and prevents people from accessing formal financial services. 

Most of the business offerings in slums are only known by word of mouth, or occasionally advertised through Facebook, limiting the number of potential clients.

Quipu offers a solution to the billions living in slums with extended smartphone access participating in the informal economy.  Quipu was designed in collaboration with the Villas de San Pablo community in Barranquilla, Colombia. The community is home to 10,000 people living in a large-scale, low-income housing project on the outskirts of the city connected by a local informal economy. Through co-designing technological platforms with the people of villas de San Pablo, Quipu translates situated knowledges into situated technologies that work by and for marginalized communities to build pathways for equitable development. Quipu aims to earn trust, share expertise, and financially empower communities like this all over the global south. 

We spent the last year working with micro-entrepenurs of Villas de San Pablo designing and refining their local platform. During our time we directed surveys to map production and consumption patterns, taught members of the community about mutual credit systems, and built a “prosumers” network willing to prototype and adopt the platform when it is released. Collaborating with local stakeholders in the design and operation of the Quipu Market is essential to the success of Quipu in each community.

In order to break cycles of chronic poverty throughout informal settlements, Quipu creates local digital markets that facilitate trade, increase disposable income, and grow shared wealth in low-income communities. Quipu understands that citizens and communities should be at the forefront of identifying their civic problems and building effective solutions to address them. That’s why Quipu is dedicated to fostering the co-design of technology as a way to enhance creativity and empower people to be the makers and creators of their own world and systems. The Quipu platform is an invented space of planning, by its users and for its user, rather than an invited space.

Using Quipu, institutional, self-employed, formal and informal sector workers can create business profiles allowing them to buy, list, and sell goods and services using a local currency. The digital market increases economic activity in the local area by promoting visibility and connecting buyers and sellers, ensuring that wealth is created and shared locally. The local digital market can be viewed by Quipu’s mobile app that can:

• Visualize available local products and customers on a map

• Connects local buyers and sellers in a collaborative trading network with a local currency that mimics the bartering systems familiar to the informal economy

• Generates and visualizes data about community production and consumption which can be used to optimize Quipu-registered businesses and establish credit worthiness 

Technology is a critical driver for those aims to be reached. Quipu operates on a web-based and app platform that takes advantage of the high penetration of smartphone and internet in informal settlements (75% penetration in Latin America). We aim to be a disruptive digital tool to build economic justice in communities of the Global South by fusing technological innovations like blockchain with grassroots-community-organizing in order to alleviate some of the pressing market failures that plague such communities. The creation of a local trading system increases users purchasing and saving power because, as an alternative way of trading, they can use the local credit to buy within the local market and reserve national currency to either save, invest, or spend outside of the community. Transactions between users will create a financial score that can enable access to loans from banks or other institutions to empower their businesses.

Quipu´s unique interdisciplinary team has shaped it in a way none of its competitors have - deep grounded knowledge of informal communities, local and national development politics and tech have helped us craft a platform to deal with the very unique reality of informal communities. We understand the communities we aim to work with as a whole and trust that we can leverage solidarity-based economies where entrepreneurs can rely on their neighbors, keeping wealth within the community, making an autonomous and collaborative means for sustainable growth. 

Quipu’s innovation is rooted within the communities we serve. The platform is an invented place of planning by its users. Our technology supports communities and its citizens in the designing of their marketplace to best reflect their values of the marketplace. The Quipu digital platform helps its users gain consciousness of their positionality within the economy in order to help them begin to conceive of an economic development counter-plan that focuses on the community beyond the individual vendors.

There is no other company in the industry that is working with informal economies as place-based communities. Fintech companies that provide financial services to people at the bottom of the pyramid focus on individual solutions, like digital payments, rather than collective ones. The Quipu Market takes a collective approach to tap the social capital of place-based, informal economies and unlock the power of their strong communal bonds, high demand for goods and services, and innovative capacity.

Our product is a market place mobile and desktop app, that maps and connects people and through blockchain provides a secure alternative point system for an evolved exchange of goods in low-income communities. Our app development is Angular,  NodeJs and it’s deployed in Firebase. Our blockchain will be hosted in firebase through our own network and will allow external nodes to be incorporated as Mainers through a place-based governance system.

Quipu brings technology and meets it with situational knowledge of the communities we serve, co-creating digital markets that are financially, socially, and environmentally aligned with the prosumers of the marketplace.

The marketplaces are designed to facilitate trade within low-income communities. The digital voucher system allows vendors and consumers to conduct transactions in a local currency and reserve fiat currency for use outside the community (education, transportation), increasing spending power. 

The data created by the recorded network of transaction will allow Quipu to do 4 things to address the problem.

1. The digital platform is designed to leverage its data to help its users understand their positionality within their place-based economies and thus develop economic counter-plans that puts the collective at the center of the solution.

2. They will be able to generate data that will position them to collectively bargain and save money for otherwise expensive products and services.

3. Quipu transaction activity establishes a financial scoring system 

4. Quipu will record transactions, seller and buyer reputation, among other data points that will us to establish an alternative financial scoring system, change the way creditworthiness is done, and provide micro-businesses with access to equitable financial services. 

5. Quipu will generate reports to inform institutional actors so that they make evidence-based decisions towards improving slum conditions and providing better services to communities. 

With more information and more income opportunities, Quipu can help lower the default and interest rates of micro-loans revolutionizing the low-income financial services industry and reversing feedback loops of chronic poverty. 

We have been working for a year in the design of the app with more than 50 micro-entrepreneurs of a social housing project in Colombia. We will launch the beta version in two months. Through grassroots viral marketing, our estimates model that by year 3 we will be operational in 8 communities (2 small, 4 medium, 2 large). At year 3 we project to hold accounts for 40,000 users and will have processed 1.9 million transactions. In five years, our impact with be trans-continental to 16 communities. We will have expanded beyond Colombia into Argentina, Peru, Mexico, and Brazil.

Within the next year, we want to launch and have adoption in two communities, raise funds, strengthen our organization, and build out our internal capacity. Within the next five years, we want to have cross-continental socio-economic impact. Most of all we want to see the communities we operate in thriving, Quipu businesses growing, livelihoods improved, and our partnerships with local stakeholders as lasting.

Currently we have a primary financial obstacle. In order for Quipu to make the impact it has the potential to have, we need to raise funds to complete the platform design, employ ourselves, and implement Quipu on the ground. 

We plan to raise funds while implementing and demonstrating impact. We are  part of Fast Forward Accelerator 2019 cohort, that is connecting us to funders, also we are applying for grants and social impact investment to cover our operational finance all while proving the capacity of our solution to create real value for the communities it serves.  

We are not part of a larger organization

2 full time and 5 part time 

We are a group of MIT and Harvard graduates with backgrounds in urban planning, community engagement, informal economics, UX design and web development. We share a unique understanding of the informal and formal cities, its inhabitants, built environment and economies, learned both through academy and a lot of fieldwork in different vulnerable communities of the global south. For example, our experience working with the community in Villas de San Pablo built trust and validated a concept that has inspired partnerships with local leaders who are excited to support us. 

QUIPU currently has one partnership to implement and run on the ground in Barranquilla: 

Fundación Mario Santo Domingo is the local partner that works with Villas de San Pablo (our pilot neighborhood) since it was built. They are helping us with the adoption as well as the algorithm to define credit scores based on the activity of the neighbors on quipu. 

Our business model begins with establishing a partnership with local stakeholders in a region of interest. We charge a set-up fee to analyze the local market and train local Quipu ambassadors on participatory action research and the solidarity economy. After the market launches, the service is free to use. The aggregated data allows Quipu to earn revenue from market reports based on never before seen data on informal economies. Quipu also earns revenue through interests on micro-loans (of half the current available interest rate).

Our first source of revenue are the set up fees we charge partner institutions to implement QUIPU in the communities where they work (Fundacion Mario Santo Domingo is our first example). After the platform is running we use the data to create reports to help anchor institutions make better decisions on social programs and public policy (second revenue) and thirdly, we will provide loans at half the interest rate of the market. Now we are being funded by seed capital and we are applying for grants, soliciting donations, to cover our operational finances until we have enough traction. 

At a starting point, Quipu and Solve share a vision and confidence in technology’s capacity to combat economic injustice. Quipu’s core is its strong partnerships to scale. A partnership with Solve ensures that we have roots in an innovative community committed to social inclusion and shared prosperity that can connect us with many other partners in the global south that might be interested in implementing QUIPU with the communities they work. 

We will benefit by learning from peer solvers. There are many accelerators and competitions for ideas that an in an early stage but not a lot that have social impact on their core mission. We believe SOLVE is a unique hub of people fostering systemic change ideas.

We want to partner with organizations that are a marketplace of products and services and also with values based banks and financial services serving the poor. Some organizations that can help us improve our product and expand are: Omydiar Network, Amazon, Etsy, Kiva, Accion, UN Habitat, IDB, CDFIs, Grameen Bank, Ripple

We are not applying to this challenge

The prize will be invested in our implementation teams setting up the first two Quipu community digital marketplaces in Colombian Caribbean Coast. Quipu will use this prize to build Quipu toolkits - a step by step guide any partner on the ground can use to design technology for services critical to their communities. We want to develop a template for other organizations to implement and design QUIPUs and other ICT4D solutions in their neighborhoods. By designing their local QUIPU market, communities can visualize the activity of their economy and create local trading systems that strengthen their economy and social ties.  

90% of QUIPU users are women. Women are the strongest entrepreneurs in low-income neighborhood and one of their biggest barriers is being able to make their business visible, because they work from home to take care of their family. We are an organization founded by women (Mercedes and Viviana) and that our main focus is giving women's in informal settlements a tool to improve their communities' economy.

We think QUIPU can be a solution that can also work in refugee camps giving their informal economic transactions. We would use this prize to pilot (from design to implementation) in one refugee camp.

We are not applying to this challenge

The prize will be invested in our implementation teams setting up the first two Quipu community digital marketplaces in Colombian Caribbean Coast. Quipu will use this prize to build Quipu toolkits - a step by step guide any partner on the ground can use to design technology for services critical to their communities. We want to develop a template for other organizations to implement and design QUIPUs and other ICT4D solutions in their neighborhoods. By designing their local QUIPU market, communities can visualize the activity of their economy and create local trading systems that strengthen their economy and social ties.  

We are not applying to this challenge