UNDP moves to scale blockchain-based digital payments after successful pilots

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) will soon have its country offices conduct digital payments at scale though blockchain infrastructure provided by the Stellar Development Foundation, a non-profit supporting open-source digital payment initiatives.

Their partnership, which will run till 2027, is getting into a new phase of concrete implementation after successful pilots, according to an announcement. The next phase of the endeavour, according to the UNDP, is to put in place the “institutional conditions under which it can be used at scale.”

Jointly, they aim to establish “the governance, onboarding, and safeguards that allow UNDP to adopt digital payments responsibly, move validated solutions from the existing pipeline into active use, and extend the same infrastructure across different categories of UNDP programming,” such humanitarian assistance and social protection.

The UNDP Alternative Finance Lab (AltFinLab) at the Istanbul Regional Hub for Europe and Central Asia is coordinating the project that was piloted for 16 months across 17 countries. This included trials on digital payment use cases, consultations with UNDP country offices and stakeholders, implementation of five live pilots, and the development of working prototypes for two additional countries.

According to the UNDP, the pilot recorded particularly high success in Syria where aid delivery cost dropped from 10 percent to two percent, and Haiti where low-connectivity payments had a 100 percent success rate.

Robert Pasicko of the UNDP Alternative Finance Lab remarked: “We have shown that digital payments can reach the people that conventional systems miss, and in some of the hardest places to operate. The work now is to make that capability ordinary, so that a country office can use it with confidence as part of how it already works, rather than treating each deployment as an experiment.”

The Chief Legal Officer of Stellar Development Foundation, Candace Kelly, said she hopes the partnership will concretely “turn a set of successful pilots into a durable part of how development and humanitarian finance is delivered.”

The initiative by the UNDP is in line with the global quest for trusted and reliable digital payments infrastructure that guarantees security and inclusion. It also represents a significant institutional shift where blockchain-based payments are increasingly being positioned as a core component of digital public infrastructure, not merely an experimental tool.

Also, the traceability and transparency of on-chain transactions align with the World Bank’s emphasis on trust frameworks that provide accountability mechanisms.

The UNDP has been pushing for the adoption of blockchain as an operational platform for digital public infrastructure.

Experts have argued that the technology will be critical to the next generation of biometrics deployments especially with GenAI.

Article Topics

blockchain  |  digital ID  |  digital payments  |  humanitarian  |  social protection  |  UNDP