The Crypto Opportunity at the Venezuela-Colombia Border

Imagine a humanitarian crisis affecting as many as 2 million people.

Governments refuse to acknowledge it, much less declare an emergency. International aid organizations won’t commit funds and aid workers.

Imagine a failing nation-state and an apathetic international response.

This is the situation in Colombia right now due to the Venezuelan migration crisis.

This is the opening for the cryptocurrency ecosystem to take on a prominent international role in providing aid and assistance where the nation-states are failing, and where most international aid organizations refuse yet to tread.

Sold Her Hair to Get Her Passport

Venezuelans are leaving their country in the tens of thousands. Even more go back and forth across the border daily to find essential food items that are not available in Venezuela.

In Venezuela right now, there are no doctor’s prescription pads left. There is no paper to print passports — without said document Venezuelans are prisoners in their own country. Border guards fleece refugees on their way out of the country, leaving them even worse off than they were before.

Two million are seeking hope in Colombia. In Colombia, there is plenty of food, but everything is expensive, and Venezuelan fiat currency is utterly worthless. The Venezuelans think they can get jobs in Colombia, but Colombia’s official unemployment rate is already 12%. What’s more, many have no passports. They’re undocumented. And the Colombians aim to deport them.

A Venezuelan woman with a master’s degree lives in a rapidly-assembled wooden shack between two cactuses in the La Guajira desert. By day, she rents a bicycle taxi to ferry tourists. She makes considerably less than $10 per day.

A professional woman with two daughters in Caracas mortgages her passport to a pimp in Cúcuta for $9 to finance a health test so she can work as a prostitute. But there are so many prostitutes now that she can’t find a client. She’s not eating. So she sells her hair to get her passport out of hock and get back to square one.

58% of the refugees are children. Many sleep in the public parks and streets of Cúcuta, Colombia — the main entry point into Colombia for the Venezuelan migrants. Pregnant women also rest their heads at night on these same public sidewalks.

A recent survey showed that 53% of the Venezuelans remaining in the country aged 15 to 29 plan to leave in the next year, fleeing 13,000% inflation and an economy expected to contract by 15% in 2018. There is nowhere for them to go where they can reasonably expect to be better off.

No Emergency? No Aid!

The government of Colombia classes these people fleeing Venezuela as migrants. As few as 4% of them qualify as refugees — refugees being people who are fleeing persecution or some kind of political crisis.

But nearly 80% of the migrant Venezuelans tell Colombian authorities that they cross the border in search of food, money and jobs.

So Colombia won’t declare a national emergency. Colombia knows they need help. But without a declaration of emergency, international aid organizations won’t pony up the funds and aid workers.

Enter the Cryptocurrency Ecosystem

This is where cryptocurrency can become a major player, entering a crisis with direct aid before, and eventually alongside, institutions like the United Nations, the US government, the EU, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), the Norwegian Refugee Council, Mercy Corps and others.

We can simply and rapidly gift a small amount of cryptocurrency to a large number of Venezuelans and Colombians alike, perhaps to feed them for a day or week. But this approach has a few problems.

• Colombians don’t need aid, at least their need is less.
• Some Venezuelans are already receiving aid from small, religious charities.
• The UN and Colombia’s El Tiempo agree: a Venezuelan family needs at least $50 per month to survive.

By partnering with one of the religious charities on the ground in Cúcuta, Colombia, where most of the migrants are coming across, and by meeting the refugees at the reception center on the Colombian side of the border, we can identify families that need help and are tech-savvy. We can provide them with direct, cash-based grants, similar to what GiveDirectly is doing in Uganda and DashDirect is doing in Ghana.

These grants can be of an amount and duration that enable the families to immediately eat and find shelter while also leaving leftover funds to start a small business.

We can coordinate the grant with a video training program and perhaps even videoconference mentoring by Latin American experts, so that the beneficiaries can receive training in cryptocurrency security as well as entrepreneurship mentoring.

We can have an initial trial with 1,000 Venezuelan families up and running by June 15 for about USD$300,000.

Merchant Adoption

But most important is that we woo the merchants of Cúcuta on board with this plan. If the beneficiaries just cash their cryptocurrency out to Colombian Pesos immediately, then all we’ve done is execute a convoluted refugee voucher system. The value-add for the cryptocurrency ecosystem is still there, but we’re leaving growth on the table.

No, working together with these migrants, many of whom are skilled professionals with smartphones and prior cryptocurrency experience, we can build on the excellent work of Dash Caracas, Dash.red, GetFreeDash and other crypto projects, and 10x the existing cryptocurrency economy in the region, circulating cryptocurrency among migrants, merchants and increasing its supply and use beyond the borders of Cúcuta, Colombia and across Latin America.

The Crypto Opportunity

The cryptocurrency ecosystem has the chance to walk into an international crisis and become a major player ahead of major UN and NGO efforts. We’re looking for partners and advisors to help us develop this plan and bring it to successful fruition rapidly, while the window of opportunity remains open for the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Image used under fair use from Diario La Calle.

Note: This idea is similar to David Hay's, partially inspired by it, but is also significantly different. I'm in touch with David and hope to work with him. But I'm also putting this idea out there to foment greater discussion around the concept.