For over 50 years, Shell and other fossil fuel companies created oil spills as they drilled in the kingdom of the Ogoni people who live in the southeastern section of Nigeria, which sits on the Gulf of Guinea. Approximately 390 square acres remain severely damaged 40 years after a major spill. The area includes wetlands, creeks and mangroves, fishing waters, and wells for drinking.

The California-based nonprofit Sustainability International, which has a mission to relieve poverty in Africa, has been working on reversing the damage on the Niger Delta. The founder and CEO, Chinyere Nnadi, has family from Nigeria; he is well aware of the difficulties involved in the project.

Sustainability International is partnering with the software company ConsenSys on an initiative, Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition. The ConsenSys impact policy manager said it simply: “The reason that the blockchain is really important is because people don’t need to trust each other, they need to trust the tool.”

“It certainly has the potential for social impact applications as well as commercial applications,” Werbach says.

“The danger is people think it’s a magic bullet. If the problem is getting accurate information into the blockchain in the first place, the blockchain can’t solve that problem. If there’s a massive power imbalance, the blockchain can’t automatically solve that. Certainly, it has a lot of potential in the social impact context. But we have to be careful about what the technology can and cannot do.”—Marian Conway

Read the source article at nonprofitquarterly.org