Digital public goods don’t all look the same. In UNICEF’s work, this means open-source digital solutions for social good in the real world rather than protocols or primitives.
But across the board, open-source digital public goods often face the same problem: funding.
That’s why we’re excited to share that the UNICEF Office of Innovation (OOI) is using Drips as part of a pilot focused on new sustainable funding solutions for digital public goods.
The role of the UNICEF Office of Innovation and digital public goods
First, some scene setting. This initiative is led by the UNICEF Office of Innovation (OOI), which focuses on frontier tech solutions to real-world challenges facing children and their communities across the globe.
UNICEF is a member of the Digital Public Goods Alliance and plays an active role in shaping how digital public goods are identified, supported and sustained globally.
In this context, Digital Public Goods (DPGs) are not an abstract idea. They are open-source digital solutions that support the advancement of SDGs and can be freely adopted and adapted by governments and organisations. These projects meet criteria set forth in the DPG Standard and also have demonstrated real-world use.
UNICEF is also the only UN organization able to receive, hold and deploy digital assets (BTC, ETH and now USDC) through its CryptoFund. For us at Drips, it’s really encouraging to see established institutions take an interest in the tools being built in web3 and explore how they can be used to support public-interest work in practice.
About the pilot
From their years of experience in the space OOI recognises that the way we fund public goods today doesn’t match the scale or impact of the work being done and that new approaches are worth serious consideration.
The aim of this pilot is to explore whether Web3 native funding tools can help make digital public goods more sustainable over time and learning how tools like Drips can complement existing funding approaches.
To do this OOI and Drips have created a dedicated Drip List featuring five digital public goods recognised for their real-world impact.
The list brings together proven applications whose open-source tools are already being used at scale to support a range of impactful use cases. These include:
- Bebbo: parenting app with locally adapted tips and support for new parents, used by more than 1.6 million families in 17 countries
- HOPE: UNICEF’s bespoke information management system for humanitarian cash transfers, reaching 25 million people in 33 countries
- Oky: period-tracking app created for and with girls, providing advice on sexual and reproductive health and rights to over 1 million girls in 12 countries
- Primero: UNICEF’s digital case management and incident monitoring tool for child protection, with 20,000 users tracking 2 million cases in 70 countries
- RapidPro: platform to design, build, pilot and scale mobile messaging interventions, with over 8 billion messages exchanged in 131 countries
Rather than exclusively funding these projects through one-off grants, the pilot uses Drips to support them through continuous funding. Contributions flow over time and are shared across all five organisations, making long-term support easier and more predictable. As funding sources shift globally, OOI is exploring novel ways to create sustainable funding for open-source tools for social good. Tapping into the Web3 community, which is ethos-aligned, to help give back to projects that are supporting millions of people across hundreds of under-served communities.
Why this matters
This pilot comes at an interesting moment for the Web3 public goods community.
Much of the infrastructure that enabled this space was built as a public good. Yet sustained funding for that work has become harder to secure over time.
Seeing the UNICEF Office of Innovation engage seriously with tools like Drips is an important signal. It shows that Web3 funding infrastructure can be useful outside crypto-native ecosystems and that it can support work with clear public value.
We’re thrilled to be part of this pilot and can’t wait to see where this work goes.
How you can support the pilot
The Drip List created as part of this pilot is live and open to anyone who wants to contribute. You may donate by connecting your wallet and pledging any ERC-20 token.
By donating to the list, you support five UNICEF-powered and proven digital public goods through a single, transparent and ongoing funding stream. Contributions can be one-off or recurring and are able to be started, adjusted or stopped at any time.
If you care about digital public infrastructure and sustainable funding models and showing major global organizations like UNICEF that the blockchain space cares about supporting Digital Public Goods, then this is a simple and concrete way to get involved.