Community Inclusion Currencies offers a community-driven credit programme to enable people to exchange goods and services and set up new businesses, helping local economies and communities to keep moving despite insufficient national currency and volatile markets.
In countries facing food insecurity, local markets are often fragmented and inefficient, resulting in soaring debts and market volatility.
In this context, women, smallholder farmers and other marginalized groups tend to be excluded from existing financial systems. Difficult access to credit impedes investment, and there is often no sustainable way for community groups to finance community projects.
Operational in Kenya, Community Inclusion Currencies aim to create and circulate local credit systems (complementary to national currency) as a form of community-driven support network using simple feature phones connected to blockchain distributed ledgers.
Communities tap into a free nationwide service supported by humanitarian organizations using tokenized agreements known as "Sarafu" to build their local markets even when the national currency is lacking.
As a result, the Community Inclusion Currencies system serves as a stable medium of exchange backed by local goods and services, contributing to greater financial inclusion for people, economic growth, and more stable markets.
Throughout the WFP Sprint Programme, Community Inclusion Currencies will support WFP's Rural Resilience Initiative in Kenya.
The project will promote stable and drought-resilient farms by supporting farmers in arid and semi-arid lands to develop Community Inclusion Currencies redeemable for local goods and services and syntropic agroforestry and sustainable water management systems.
