Beyond Protocol: Funder and Service Agent Interaction in the Niger Delta

Sela was founded with the premise that talent is universally distributed but opportunities and access to capital are getting increasingly concentrated. Our work attempts to provide opportunities to people located in emerging markets and empower them in sustainably building their communities and owning that process via distributed ledger technology. There are several reasons why we focus on emerging markets, two examples being that most young people are located there, and that India, Africa and Latin America will have the fastest growing populations in the 21st century. Positively impacting the living conditions of the fastest growing global populations is one of the most effective ways of positively impacting the future of the planet.

More than half of the world’s population growth will be in Africa by 2050

Driving positive impact in the Niger Delta is Sela’s first initiative. The region produces most of the oil in Nigeria but has seen relatively little positive benefit from the revenues generated from that industry, while experiencing thousands of unresolved oil spills. For the first phase of our product development, our team is located in New York and the first challenge we addressed was to build empathy for the population that would use our product.

Some members of the team were born and raised in West Africa before moving to America, and we frequently visit our home countries so we have an understanding of the mentality and living conditions. By doing so we might be tempted to think that we knew enough about our users to allow us to extrapolate from our experiences growing up in and frequently visiting West Africa.

But we didn’t. It’s a fallacy I have often fallen into when designing consumer products for my friends in college. I would sit there, imagine 1,000 users like me and work the user experience from my assumptions and biases without interviewing many others. This time it was different. Our users were located 5,000 miles away.

To systematically learn about our target user-base, the team developed a survey to gather information about access to mobile phones, bank accounts, revenue streams and spending habits. We then hired an organization in Nigeria around December 5th and put them in charge of gathering the 100 interviews. We paid them a monthly stipend to conduct interviews, sent to us via WhatsApp videos.

Over the first two weeks, we only received three interviews. We needed 100 by mid-February. Several factors could explain this: the second half of December is festive in Nigeria and there were limited incentives to deliver the interviews as soon as possible. We were also one of many projects for the organization, and it turned out that one main employee was assigned to this task.

At this pace, it would have taken several months and a significant increase in budget to gather enough interviews.We were puzzled as to what to do next. At first, we were tempted to blame the organization, but, after sitting down and examining the incentive structure, we realized we had misaligned incentives and engaged an inefficient work structure:

1. By paying the organization to do interviews, their natural incentive would be to stretch the contract for as long as possible. Simply paying them and telling that we wanted the job done as soon as possible was not the solution, especially when we were separated by 5,000 miles.
2. Since we were one of many projects, communication with the leaders of the organization was bottlenecked
3. The employee actually doing the job in the organization, Ikechukwu Ahaka was not receiving the full benefit of his work.

We realized we needed to change the incentive structure. The first thing we did was to remove the monthly salary condition, and work directly with the organization’s employee. We designed the experiment as follows:

1. The deadline given to the contractor would be five weeks
2. We would pay the contractor a stipend per interview
3. If the 100 interviews were delivered within three weeks, he would get a 50% bonus for all interviews
4. If the 100 interviews were delivered within 4 weeks, we would apply a 20% bonus for all interviews

We made the change on January 8th at which point we only had five interviews. What followed was a pleasantly surprising result: the contractor responded to this new challenge by delivering over 85 interviews in the span of four weeks. In addition, to accomplishing such a task, he borrowed money from a friend to hire a translator, paid a transportation fee to travel into different communities, and performed interviews on market days (when he could interview more people in less time). He studied the community and realized that there were two days in the week — Tuesday and Thursday — when food traders were selling fish, so he optimized his schedule around that event to make the most of his trips.

Using a simple intervention and change in the incentive structure, we had changed the mentality and behavior of Ike. He transformed himself into an entrepreneur , taking financial risk and building a team to achieve a mission, and gained status in his community.

This incentive structure is interesting for us at Sela because the type of agreement stated above can easily be turned into a smart contract on the blockchain. For example, the fee per video can be a form of conditional payment, and the stipend distributed to the contractor can be sent in the form of a cryptocurrency to streamline international payment. A surprising fact we learned is that we had to be flexible. For example, one of our payments to the contractor that was done via bank account took a couple days to arrive, slowing the Ike’s work.

In addition, he felt sick for week, so we had to move the deadline of the contract to make up for his illness and delay the payment on our side. Finally, a good amount of the interactions which consisted of logging the data captured, sending congratulatory messages and, regularly checking-in can be scaled via a conversational interface to coordinate the work of multiple agents. From interactions like this, it is evident that human support would likely still be required to, for example, evaluate requests for extensions but otherwise a good amount of the interaction can be automated via artificial intelligence.

Use cases like this allow us to test several of our assumptions and learn where technology fits to:

1. Drive change in behavior via the proper incentive and reward structures by setting the parameters and challenging the human agents to optimize performance to meet the goals
2. Encode these incentives into smart contracts
3. Use cryptocurrencies to streamline our workflow by facilitating instantaneous cross-border payments and incentives
4. Use conversational interfaces to regularly check-in and scale the coordination of human agents, classify queries into expected inputs or emergencies/crises needing our attention (i.e deadline extension). A challenge we anticipate on that front is achieving a healthy balance between human empathy/support and chatbot-driven empathy.

We will discuss the content learned from our interviews in another post. That’s it folks!

Beyond Protocol is a blog series by Sela that takes readers through the journey and thought processes involved in using blockchain and other cutting-edge technologies to drive tangible impact in the world

Hassan Kané is a recent graduate of MIT. He’s a tech entrepreneur and AI researcher current serving as the CTO of Sela which is building a blockchain-based micropayment and distributed communication platform enabling participants to collect and distribute value and information across a transparent and reputation-driven network

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