Author name: Dr Maxwell Ampong

I have two friends that always leave me feeling somewhat better after I speak with them. One is always on some cool project that stimulates my intellect so our conversations are great. I call the other one to complain about issues I have every now and then and hear his as well.  When this second guy tells me about his concerns, his debts, his personal struggles, no matter how worried I feel about my situation, I always finish the conversation feeling like “Wow Maxwell you have it not as bad as you think, AT ALL!”. That is how refugees make me feel when I speak with them. They make me feel like Ghana’s cherished democracy and affinity for peace and calm should not be undervalued in the slightest bit. My network provider frustrates me so much when I get interrupted cell service (I am not naming anyone oo). Traffic on the relatively short route to my house after work can keep me in a foul mood for taking two hours I could have deployed doing something else. After I speak with Rya Kuewor and Avina Ajith, that day, I whistle on my way home. Why? Because I feel lucky to have my life as it currently stands. Also, read the title to this article again: Crypto-driven Universal Basic Income as a tool to reach refugees during the pandemic. What a title! These are the guys behind such an initiative.  Look at all the havoc COVID-19 is wreaking with its line-up of variant after variant. I just read about a new Delta-plus variant and I haven’t even fully understood the Delta variant yet. If you find yourself in a refugee camp, you can just imagine how quickly things can get dire. As noted by the Global Spokesperson for the UNHCR, “Discriminatory restrictions on access to health and social services and a dramatic loss of livelihoods is driving many refugees and others on the margins of society deeper into poverty and destitution.” Also reported in Ghana, “Refugees and migrants were left more vulnerable with limited protection and rights, facing inequitable distribution of even masks and soap, ostensibly existing refugee aid and support weren’t sufficient in dealing with a global pandemic.” Refugees have had it badly long before this deadly global pandemic reared its ugly head, which raises the question: how can we relieve the extreme duress on certain communities around the world struggling to cope with the impacts of COVID-19? The public has the tendency to always point to what should have been done. Spend a cedi here and you’d hear how you should have spent it there. Spend a cedi there the next time and you’d here how something way over there needs more attention. Let’s not do this with this subject matter. Let’s concentrate. Refugees leave their countries for various reasons, mostly seeking refuge, as the name suggests. You’d cherish your access to education when you hear how without the limited scholarship and donor programs available to them, a significant number of refugees have to stop schooling after junior high, that’s even if they get there. One man came to Ghana from Liberia in a canoe, after losing his entire family to gruesome war crimes.  Let that sink in: he came not in a boat, not in a ship, but a canoe, from the shores of faraway Liberia, to Ghana’s shores, by sea, amidst all the storms and tidal turbulence, in a handmade wooden canoe. Anything could have happened. And he came here with nothing, lucky to have his life and a chance at another shot at living.  If a group of young migrant integration consultants have figured out a way to impact these refugees, and in a big way, then it’s worth mentioning. Even with just $1.50 a day to a refugee as Universal Basic Income (UBI), utilising cryptocurrency and other innovative ways of disbursement, it can mean everything and anything from food for an entire household to much needed basic medicine. Rya and Avina impact tens of thousands of refugees through the Refugee Integration Organisation (RIO). Please find information on work that’s being done below, by kind courtesy of RIO. RIO and partners find a way past the exclusionary modernity of technology to bring blockchain-driven UBI to underprivileged refugee communities. With the accelerated advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it has become ever more easy to deploy new cutting-edge technologies in existing and worsening vulnerable communities. But innovations in new tech do not necessarily translate into working solutions. Sometimes, tech needs to be dialled back in order to reach the most vulnerable in communities and have the most effective outcomes.  The Refugee Integration Organisation (RIO) did just that by taking a cryptocurrency (Celo Dollar) based UBI programme by Impact Market — which distributes money through mobile apps — and incorporating a USSD feature linked to beneficiary mobile money wallets, so even refugees without smartphones or those who aren’t tech savvy could receive these vital funds. In short, unaccompanied minors, the elderly, the ill etc., can all access these funds without any special training. In thinking through solutions, we ask ourselves — are practical economic development interventions in refugee camps truly as difficult to achieve as they appear? The answer, for us, is “No”. RIO displays great scope by scaling down technologies, creating the right partnerships, and skilfully shifting power-of-management to the residents of refugee camps. Resistance to UBI is founded upon people’s visceral response to unconditional hand-outs, forgetting that the hand-out is only enough (if even) to support subsistence and bare survival. Critics often fear outcomes of induced lethargy, loss of productivity and moral hazards. They believe UBI could have a negative domino effect on economies by reducing people’s incentive to work (or inducing a disincentive effect on the workforce) and driving up wage rates.  However, a World Bank report and empirical research across contexts has shown no negative effects on labour force participation and enhancements in productivity. In fact, a study on a Namibian UBI experiment called BIG shows that the programme encourages people to pursue more income-generating activities, thus producing positive spill-over effects for

You have a good idea… then what? In Ghana, ideas unfortunately do not have a well-defined route to turning into large-enough enterprises such that your community, your country, your continent benefit from it.  By the way, you inspired this article.  All of you that text, email, dm and call me after every publication to discuss ideas about varying subject matters, you inspired this article. Because regardless of the subject matter, a common closing theme with all the awesome brainstorming conversations has been “…but Max where at all do we find the money to do this?” Not to get you too excited… but I think I might have found the answer of where to get the funding for anything as small as just an idea, or as big as an already functioning well-to-do business. To fully grasp the opportunity, we need to first understand how things are going to be. If you have as little an idea, and that idea sounds pretty good to an investor, you need to put a price on it. It will totally be up to you to decide the value of your pending company, and how many shares you want to sell to an investor for funding. If an idea works and you start a company, you’ll obviously need money. Many have learnt that the odds really are against you when you start a company with your limited savings, so better get an investor early. There’s just too much risk inherent in the activities of startups and one-man entrepreneurs. If your idea doesn’t take off, you lose your precious time and the wealthy investor learns something towards his next venture. But if your idea starts off well, you’ll soon realise that you need money to stay in business or to scale up; so why not share that early risk with someone that has the liberty of losing their money and has more experience than you do. Traditional financial institutions are beginning to cater better to the needs of the small and the beginning. Still, in Ghana, ideas unfortunately do not have a well-defined route to turning into large-enough enterprises such that your community, your country, your continent benefit from it. When your idea is good enough, typically, you’ll need what we call seed funding. At the beginning, your idea is like a seed, full of potential but useless until it goes into the soil and catered for. You’ll need to first plant that seed knowing very well it might not germinate. Therein lies all the risk that traditional financial institutions do not want to underwrite.  That is why early investors at this stage are called seed investors. Many seed investors are high net worth individuals that have enough money to bet that you are more likely to succeed than you are to fail. How do they know? Every seed investor invests for different reasons. What they all have in common is that they are aware that you are not yet a big fish, but they are willing to grow with you. If the seed is the idea that’s good enough, then what happens when you have an idea that’s not executable yet? That’s the pre-seed. It means you have something, but it’s not good enough to attract serious funding yet. Are there pre-seed investors available? Yes! These are they guys that think “here, take this little token; execute and let’s see if the simplest version of our product/service works”. Pre-seed investors try to help you create what we call the minimum viable product (MVP). Your MVP is a version of your product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development. I took this straight from Wikipedia because it explains it well.  See how it mentions “future product development”? It means pre-seed investors understand that their money goes to do the work required (pre-seed) before the work that is required (seed) before the real work actually starts (seed sprout). Further funding are categorized Series A, Series B, Series C, etc. The earlier the stage, the more the risk, the lower the valuation of the enterprise, the cheaper you can buy in, and the bigger the gains for anyone that invested early IF the whole thing works out. Remember that the investee company can as easily just go bust. That’s why seed investors are usually high-net-worth-individuals with lots of money to spare. I’ll give you an example for perspective, then we proceed. Back in 2013, Rapper Nasir Jones, popularly known by his hip-hop moniker Nas, invested between $100,000 and $500,000 into a company called CoinBase in a Series B funding round. That round valued CoinBase at about $150million. Even if he invested the maximum estimated $500k, he then owned only about 0.33% of the company. CoinBase is a platform to buy, sell and store cryptocurrency. I remember 2013 very well. Cryptocurrencies were still spoken of then as a social experiment that was too risky to buy into and could potentially wipe out all of your investments. Fast forward to 14th April 2021. CoinBase goes public with an successful IPO (Initial Public Offering) on NASDAQ. The company is now worth dozend of billions of dollars. Nas’ earlier investment has turned into an estimated $100,000,000 if he invested $500k. That’s a hundred million dollars on $500k within 8years. He could just as easily lost all of his money. Moving on. When you ask investors to give you money for a share of your company, the investors decide on how much they can buy and you as the founder decide on what percentage of your company you can give them in exchange. It’s a negotiation. If for instance the investor gives you ₵100,000 and you decide to give him 10% of your company, that means that you’ve valued your company at ₵1,000,000. You have to divide the invested amount by the percentage given to get your company valuation. 100,000 ÷ 10% = 1,000,000 It is always very important and most advisable to consult a good lawyer and an appropriate finance professional when engaging

19.447 billion metric tonnes and 353.8 million TEU (twenty-foot Equivalent Unit). From January 2020 to April 2021, the volume of cargo that have been through Chinese ports was almost 19.5 billion tonnes. Within the same period, the container throughput stands at over 350 million 20FT container equivalent units. Since the pandemic, China has been recovering faster than many other countries, with their export figures rebounding spectacularly after the first half of 2020. Western countries started buying large volumes of products from China, especially the United States of America. So, huge volumes of shipping containers had to leave Chinese ports. Cargo for ocean freight are transported in metal containers. When these shipping containers are delivered to the port of destination, they usually circle back to the port of loading, albeit many make a few stops along the way when required. When it gets back to the original port, the process repeats itself. That has not been happening. It’s because China is currently shipping way more to the US, Europe and the rest of the world than it is importing. China has been moving a lot of shipping containers to their biggest markets and these containers do not circle back to facilitate other exports. Why? Millions of shipping containers were stranded at many locations around the world when the pandemic started. Congested ports also did not have the needed manpower to process customs procedures in a fast manner. These hampered global container circulation.  Many shipping containers were stranded on Chinese ports as well at the beginning of the pandemic. But theChinese economy rebounded. These shipping containers got emptied and were sent back out due to Western demand for Asian made products. The story is not the same in most parts in the world. A shortage in this instance means shipping containers are congested somewhere, concentrated elsewhere, not repurposed or out of commission. A few months back, Bloomberg reported on a massive backlog of 28 container ships that were waiting to enter just the US ports of Long Beach California and Los Angeles. An additional 16 ships full of containers were expected to arrive over the following three days. A week before that, it was 26 container ships. Reports from officials monitoring marine traffic in San Pedro Bay indicated it was less than the 40 container-vessels backlog peak back in February 2021. Also, back in March 2021, one of the world’s largest container vessels, a 400m-long 200,000-tonne ship called The Ever Given, got stuck in the Suez Canal and frustrated the entire global shipping industry. About 12% of global trade use the canal daily. So it’s understandable how and why it became such a big deal. The Ever Given got stuck after it run aground and wedged sideways across the canal, blocking passage for other ships. There were over 360 ships that were waiting on either sides of the canal to cross during this blockade. This contributed to the current shortage of containers globally. It made worse an already ailing world container circulation. During the second half of 2020, ecommerce traffic exploded all over the world. Amazon profits have soared past 200% since this pandemic begun. China represents a very large volume of suppliers for ecommerce websites and China is currently shipping more to the US and Europe than it is importing. You’d have to also factor in the fact that over the last few decades, there has been a lot of outsourcing to China. So already, China has been exporting massively to many parts of the world. This global container shortage situation has been a problem waiting to happen, only very much exacerbated by the current COVID pandemic. Heavy competition for available containers have sent shipping rates through the roof. The whole situation looks dreadful when you factor in the current limited air freight capacity since the pandemic started. The Airline industry have been dealt a heavy blow with record low number of flights. When there’s increased demand, prices usually rise. With freight rates soaring, and a shortage of shipping containers, coupled with limited air freight capacity, ecommerce companies and their customers suffer. In the West, retail purchasing has shifted to primarily ecommerce because of lockdowns and other COVID-related restrictions. As earlier stated, China is exporting more to the West than vice versa and most of these shipping containers are not circling back. Compared to Q1 2020, freight rates have gone up by as much as 300% from China to the USA. That shipping cost surge must be borne by someone: the consumer. In Ghana, everyone purchases one thing or another that’s imported. Most of our poultry is imported. Most of our rice is imported. When companies suffer added costs yet maintain increased demand, the final bearer of the added cost is none other than yours truly: you. Remember, extra shipping costs must be borne by someone. E-commerce has picked up in Ghana at a fast and impressive pace. The brief lockdown we experienced also accelerated this. Yet, it’s still not mainstream to use an app or a website to order for broiler (frozen chicken product) for cooking. The fact still remains that a large volume of what we consume as citizens are imported. Because China is facing a challenge with container circulation, any country that depends on Chinese exports will be affected. It’s safe to say then that it is why seemingly every country in the world is affected by this inadequate container circulation, including Ghana and where we get our imports. Think electronics; think automobile spare parts; think household items, etc.  What’s happening is that there’s so much cargo waiting to be loaded onto shipping vessels, and the ships are ready, but shipping containers are scarce because of all the above-mentioned.  The higher the demand, the more visible the variance. Here’s an example. Let’s take frozen poultry products. Everybody eats chicken, generally speaking. The sale price of one carton of chicken leg quarters (broiler) has increased from GH¢97 as at two weeks ago, to GH¢115 this week. It looks like it’ll go up a bit next week as well. I know because I checked. All this is because freight rates and other delivery coststo Ghana have gone up just as with other places in the world due to the limited availability of shipping containers. Importers are not carrying these extra