Latest news with #Stellenbosch University
News24
5 days ago
- Business
- News24
Master's student's digital voucher system links donors to beneficiaries in cashless society
A Stellenbosch University master's student has developed a blockchain-based voucher system that connects donors, beneficiaries, and vendors. Blockchain – an online, easily visible, transaction recording system – was prototyped to address the inequality crisis by enabling transparent charitable donations in an increasingly cashless society. The blockchain voucher concept promotes 'community philanthropy' by digitising everyday acts of giving to preserve informal charitable practices as South Africa transitions away from cash-based transactions. A Stellenbosch University master's student has built a prototype to aid South Africa's inequality crisis: A blockchain-based voucher system connecting donors, beneficiaries, and vendors. Developed as a conceptual model in 2024 and published under an article titled 'Voucher tokenisation using blockchain and smart contracts to support people in need' in the South African Journal of Science, the system addresses a critical challenge of assisting people operating in the cash-based, donation-centred informal sector. 'Building a way for people to trust one another without trusting the person, and instead, the protocol, deeply aligns with a gap [in social welfare] that we have currently. We've got huge amounts of NGOs that get huge amounts of money from donors, but you don't actually know where it ends up,' said author Tricia Harraway. READ | Seven advances in technology that we're likely to see in 2025 'The programme was developed to address challenges such as homelessness and informal work where people in need rely on cash donations, despite a shift toward cashless transactions,' she continued, explaining her motivation. Blockchain is a digital record-keeping system that stores information across many computers instead of one central database. 'If you break block and chain, it's a block of transactions linked to each other in an immutable fashion. You can't change it, so any fraudulent activities are clear,' explained Harraway. 'It's trustless. You're not trusting an intermediary like a bank or government. More importantly, it's transparent to the world. So, for somebody that wants to donate, they can see when it is donated to that person and redeemed by that person,' she said. The voucher programme is a digital system to encourage what Harraway refers to as community philanthropy. The study explained: '[It] is a digital system for charitable donations, allowing donors to purchase and distribute digital vouchers to beneficiaries, who can redeem them for essential goods and services.' These digital vouchers can be used for necessities like food, clothing, and shelter. Harraway built a prototype of the underlying system as a proof of concept, but the actual practical implementation would be up to an organisation were it to attempt to implement the system. 'To donate to me, you'd scan my QR code, like an account number. You decide to donate a tokenised blanket voucher. You transfer it with your wallet to me. I then go to Pick n Pay, and to redeem that voucher, tap my NFC card.' The system required minimal technological infrastructure for beneficiaries. 'NFC cards are very cheap, so that saves us the problem with the mobile devices. If a person loses that card, you can replace it,' added Harraway's supervisor, Professor James Bekker. Harraway believed this voucher donation system could build trust between the public and a government organisation or NGO that decided to implement it. It would bank on transparency and trust that may be lost when donating to larger, prominent organisations. However, she did acknowledge that there were practical challenges that could prevent the implementation of such a system. 'Somebody would still need to manage the layer on top,' she said, referring to the platform people would engage with. Additionally, convincing vendors to join the platform and distributing NFC cards to the beneficiaries might present challenges. 'I can poke holes in this forever because I think you should poke holes in it. You should be creating more opportunities for people to improve an idea,' Harraway said. Harraway developed this with the idea of encouraging direct giving within communities, 'I'm interested in community philanthropy because we do that way more on a day-to-day basis than formalised ways of giving. For example, donating to a parking guard or buying a Coke for someone. Those smaller acts of kindness might decrease when we stop using cash.' With South Africa's inequality crisis showing no signs of abating, blockchain-based voucher systems could offer a path to greater financial inclusion and more effective humanitarian support in an increasingly digital economy.
Mail & Guardian
14-07-2025
- Science
- Mail & Guardian
People back climate policy when weather events feel personal, new study finds
The effects of extreme weather events are disproportionately felt in countries in the Global South. Most people are more likely to support A few extreme weather events also seem to influence support for climate policies in different ways, according to the team of authors, which included Marina Joubert, an associate professor at the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology at Stellenbosch University. The Nature Climate Change , found that although extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense because of climate change, little is known about how experiencing these events — and attributing them to climate change — affects support for climate policies, particularly in the Global South. The effects of extreme weather events are disproportionately felt in countries in the Global South. 'Even though the The study shows that when people connect extreme weather such as heatwaves, floods and droughts to climate change, they're much more likely to support climate action, Joubert said. 'This matters for countries like South Africa where climate impacts are already being felt. One surprising finding from our study is that people in Africa, especially in South Africa, are less likely to say that climate change is behind extreme weather events,' she said. 'That's not because the weather is not changing, but because climate change awareness is still low.' To build support for climate solutions, there is an urgent need for better public communication that explains to people what is happening and why, Joubert said. The researchers assessed support for the following five climate policies: increasing taxes on carbon-intense foods, raising taxes on fossil fuels, expanding infrastructure for public transportation, increasing the use of sustainable energy, and protecting forested and land areas. They used combined large-scale natural and social science data from 68 countries to develop a measure of how many people were exposed to extreme weather events — and to explore whether this exposure, along with people's beliefs about whether climate change has affected extreme weather events over the last decades, predict their support for climate policies. They also comparatively assessed the link between the size of exposed populations, defined as the average annual proportion of a country's total population exposed to a specific weather-related hazard, to several extreme weather events and support for climate policies. They found that in line with previous research, increasing carbon taxes received the lowest support, with only 22% and 29% of people, respectively, indicating they very much supported increased taxes on carbon-intensive foods and fossil fuels. Protecting forested and land areas, by contrast, was a popular policy option, with 82% supporting it very much and only 3% not supporting it at all. The second-most supported policy was increasing the use of sustainable energy, with 75% supporting it very much, and only 5% not supporting it at all. The research showed that not all climate policies are equally popular, revealing that people around the world, including in Africa, are far more supportive of clean energy and forest protection than carbon taxes. 'That's an important message for governments. If you want public buy-in, you have to focus on solutions that people understand and support,' Joubert said. The study provides global evidence that subjective attribution of extreme weather events to climate change is associated with greater policy support for climate mitigation, the researchers said. 'Overall, different extreme weather events appear to have different relationships with climate policy support. This pattern highlights the importance of comparative analyses that consider different types of events,' the study said. 'In line with previous studies we also found that subjective attribution interacts with exposure to European winter storms, heatwaves, heavy precipitation and tropical cyclones to predict climate policy support.' Mere exposure to extreme weather events might therefore not suffice to increase policy support unless individuals link these events to climate change. While larger exposure to extreme events was not found to be related to policy support, except for wildfires, the researchers could not rule out that changes in the frequency of extreme weather events over time might be sufficient to shift support. 'Nevertheless, our data suggest that if individuals attribute extreme weather events to climate change, support for climate policies is higher regardless of whether the events are more frequent.' The reverse causal relationship is also possible: people who are supportive of climate policies are more likely to attribute extreme weather to climate change, the study said, noting that longitudinal panel studies are needed to investigate the nature and direction of this relationship. The research also found strong differences in support across countries and policies. Support for climate policies was particularly high in African and Asian countries, average in Australia, Costa Rica and the United Kingdom, and below the global average in several European countries, such as Czechia, Finland and Norway. 'Participants who identified as men, were younger, more religious, had higher education, higher income, left-leaning politics and who lived in urban areas were more likely to support climate policies,' the report said. For some events, such as heatwaves and tropical cyclones, the effects of exposure on climate policy support were stronger for individuals who attribute extreme weather events to climate change more strongly. 'One possible explanation is that these types of extreme weather events allow for management strategies that can directly reduce the hazard itself, such as man-made flood protections, irrigation systems, prescribed burn-offs and land-use policies. 'Therefore, people may be more likely to support policies pertaining to law enforcement or economic regulations instead of climate change mitigation.' The researchers however pointed out that exposure to most types of extreme events did not predict people's support for climate policies. The extent to which people attributed extreme weather events to climate change varied across regions of the world. People in South America most strongly agreed that the occurrence of extreme weather events has been affected by climate change over the last decades, especially in Brazil and Colombia. This might be explained by the fact that belief in human-caused climate change and self-reported personal experience of extreme weather events are high in Latin America. People in Northern Europe and Africa, on the other hand, were less likely to attribute extreme weather events to climate change. In Africa, this could be explained by low levels of climate change awareness and belief in human-caused climate change across the continent. The researchers called for more studies about effective climate change communication on types of extreme weather events that are not typically associated with climate.
