Problem
Over 700 million people, or 10 percent of the world’s population, live in extreme poverty. 150 countries have at least one law that treats women and men differently, and 63 countries have five or more laws based in gender inequality. Almost 90 percent of global marine fish stocks are now fully exploited or overfished. What do these dire statistics have in common? They are all part of the United Nations ambitious set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs for short). By 2030, members of the UN aspire to create a world of environmental sustainability, social justice, and economic opportunity for all. This is a lofty and inspiring mission, perhaps the loftiest set of goals in history... but there’s a problem: how do we know which strategies work as intended? Considering the hundred plus targets and indicators, countless agencies and organizations and stakeholders working in maddeningly complex and ever-changing environments across the globe, how can we determine what actions and conditions lead to success? And better still, how can we share lessons across the field so that we can replicate that success? Thousands of agencies and organizations around the globe are working to achieve those 17 ambitious goals set out by the UN in 2015. However, even the largest organizations often lack an effective system for tracking, analyzing, and visualizing program findings. Frequently, program data is scattered around myriad spreadsheets, which are disconnected and disorganized across individual computers. Learning within the same organization is a tedious, time-consuming process of manually collecting and interpreting data, and then posting findings in long, technical PDF reports. Learning across organizations is even more challenging, if not impossible in many cases.
Proposed Solution
Indra is a strategic planning application that compiles and manages mountains of program data to generate actionable insights about the factors that contribute to success across programs, activities, and global regions. Built on blockchain to create a decentralized and distributed global database of program findings, the app offers teams an intuitive platform to monitor, analyze, and visualize the effectiveness of their strategies. The app harnesses machine learning to identify patterns and provide recommendations on which actions are likely to succeed under a given set of conditions. Program teams can then adapt their strategies to ensure that time and resources are spent wisely - ensuring that teams achieve their desired program outcomes.
Why blockchain is needed
Indra aims to leverage machine learning to conduct analysis of data related to programs addressing the Sustainable Development Goals Effective ML analysis of SDG strategies, activities, and conditions requires massive amount of data To find out what works, what doesn’t, and under what conditions, it will also be important to process and analyze data within and between organizations around the globe How to get access to this data from global organizations? Organizations are very unlikely to trust some other organization with managing all of their program data, least of all to share it for analysis Blockchain allows the creation of a decentralized global database that no one organization has control or management over - they own their own data, and can share the level and type of data they choose to share Blockchain allows all members of the network to have equal access to the aggregated and analyzed program findings, giving all members an incentive to continue using the software As this distributed network of program findings grows, the accuracy and depth of the analysis through machine learning can also continue to improve, delivering increasingly better returns to all members
Size of the market
Different types of NGOs work in the conservation space. They can be solely doing conservation work, or part of a larger environmental organization.
At a high level, the NGOs can be categorized by their impact levels: Global, Regional, and Country
Definition for each impact level is as follows:
Global: Have offices and programs in multiple continents (i.e. Conservation International)
Regional: Have continent focused programs (i.e. European Wildlife)
Country: Have country focused programs (i.e. Australian Wildlife Conservancy)
The addressable market across all levels is currently around 479 NGOs, the breakdown of impact is as follows: Global 16%, Regional 4%, Country 80% (Developed World 68%, Developing World, 12%)
Compared with small organizations, it is more difficult to implement new technology at larger organizations because they are generally more bureaucratic - resulting in more time and effort for approval and delivery
Strategic approach is to approach NGOs at the Country level, prioritizing those in the developed world, resulting in total available market at 68%
Subsequently, initial target market is US based NGOs at 32%
Opportunity remains to scale to non-US based NGOs in the developed world
Competing alternative solutions
Tedious and inefficient system of individual spreadsheets, documents, and standalone project databases scattered around an organization and across the globe Miradi conservation planning software (www.miradi.org) and Miradi Share online library of shared projects (www.miradishare.org) TOCO - Theory of Change Online software (toco.actknowledge.org) KUMU system mapping and data visualization (www.kumu.io) Proprietary data management systems (e.g., unlocking.tnc.org) Data analysis consultants (e.g., www.elderresearch.com)
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