By affording me the means to install the intended grain facility, you will have enabled me to create an unlikely solution, by an unlikely creator — myself, someone who has battled hunger and ultra-poverty my entire life — in an unlikely part of the world: Uganda’s poorest region.
It is partly the reason I want our intended plant to be 80% owned by the rural poor farmers across our region who will be growing the crops that this plant will working on. Running this plant as a traditional capitalist endeavor means I’ll have forgotten who I am, and I’ll have forgotten the primary setup of the community to which I belong.
Also:
Only you, the people of crypto/web3, can afford me this.
Putting aside all other factors that have kept the rural poor in a place like ours in chronic poverty, humanity’s own establishment systems — traditional philanthropy, the traditional monetary system, the global antipoverty movement etc — have historically kept people like us on the sidelines of the global fight against poverty, and are the main reason people like us are where we are today.
For example, the processing plant alone for which I am now seeking help from you, the people of crypto/web3, I began raising support for this plant 8 years ago. In 2017, I made this presentation before the UNDP Uganda Country Director and the UNDP senior team about this, but nope.
In 2016, while running a ginger project where the majority of our farmers (in Kamuli & Buyende) were poor women, I asked UN Women if they could only send us one of their Goodwill Ambassadors, or a storyteller like Brandon Stanton of HONY, to see our work with rural poor women firsthand, then help us develop a processing plant that’d enable us scale our work. UN Women, too, simply said no.
Between those years, I have precisely contacted every person on earth who is anyone, but nope. When I first came up with the idea of the UCF in 2014, I was personally still going hungry, without any food. Even in the very week of September 25 – 27, 2015 when the Global Goals were being launched, I was practically having no food, but I was paying close attention to what was happening in the world, and my goal was to ensure that, come 2030, things shouldn’t really be the same. Except it hasn’t worked.
But the little that I have read about crypto/web3 thus far, is that you, the people of crypto, believe decentralized systems like web3 are the ultimate way of ensuring all humans have the sovereignty, freedom and independence that all other systems have long failed to bring. It is one of the things that have motivated me to write to you.
Let’s make crypto a force that can accomplish what other traditional systems have long failed to accomplish.