Successful completion of the 5th DIVA Donate campaign
By Walodja1987 at
We are excited to announce the successful conclusion of our 5th campaign to deliver anticipatory cash transfers to pastoralist communities in Kenya. This campaign was conducted in collaboration with Ripple using their new stablecoin RLUSD on Ethereum as the payout token.
Due to favorable vegetation conditions, no payout was triggered. Participants can reclaim their contributions by following the steps outlined in this video. These funds can be redeposited in future campaigns to amplify their impact.
Let’s dive into the details and key learnings from this campaign.
✨ Campaign overview
The campaign aimed to assess vegetation health using the NDVI metric, derived from satellite imagery, at the end of May during Kenya’s long rainy season (March-June). If the data had indicated vegetation stress, funds would have been automatically disbursed to participating pastoralists in Laikipia North – a drought-prone region – to support them financially through the upcoming dry season.
More details can be found in the original campaign announcement.
🐐 Pastoralist onboarding
For this campaign, new participants from Laikipia North region were onboarded. Thanks to the dedicated efforts of two village champions, 517 pastoralists were successfully added, 365 of them (~70%) were women.
♥️ Campaign contributions
A total of $36,709 was contributed, providing coverage of $71 to each participating pastoralist – e.g., enough to sustain one livestock for six months in case of drought.
Key funding sources included:
- $25,000 grant from Ripple, the headline sponsor of this campaign
- $11,640 in rolled-over funds from previous campaigns, originally contributed by Mercy Corps Ventures and Arbitrum
- $67 from six external contributors
🌱 NDVI result
On 31 May 2025, the NDVI value was recorded at 0.65 (reported as 1.65 for technical reasons). This value exceeded the 0.61 threshold required to trigger donations, indicating healthy vegetation conditions across the region.
Figure 1: eVIIRS NDVI data for Laikipia North. Source: FEWS
Figure 2: Donation release profile for Laikipia North.
As a result, no payouts were released to beneficiaries in this round
💰 Fund rollover
Since no payouts were triggered, all partner contributions including Ripple funds have been reclaimed and will be rolled into the next campaign, launching in September and covering the rainy period Oct-Dec 2025.
This demonstrates how every dollar contributed multiplies its impact through our need-based approach, ensuring funds are donated only when they are most needed.
🎖️ Participant reward
As a token of appreciation, all participants received a POAP, a digital certificate on the blockchain, to commemorate their contribution. Donations of $75 or more got the golden-ring POAP. Smaller contributions received the silver POAP.
View your POAP here. Thank you to all contributors for your generosity and support! 🙏
📚 Key learning
External contributions
As with previous campaigns, external contributors accounted for only a small portion of total funding. While the protocol remains open for public donations, the main funding source continues to be strategic partnerships with aligned organizations. This reinforces our focus going forward to prioritize institutional partnerships that enable us to reach scale, while maintaining the openness of the platform for individuals who wish to contribute.
Pastoralists onboarding
Onboarding new pastoralists involves higher initial acquisition costs, driven by extensive travel requirements and limited transport infrastructure in these remote areas. For this reason, onboarding new pastoralists should be done with the clear intent to run repeat campaigns with them, over multiple seasons. This ensures that the onboarding costs are spread across several campaigns, reducing the per-campaign cost over time. It is important that this dynamic is clearly communicated to partners and carefully factored into campaign planning, especially when expanding into new regions or scaling existing regions.
Communication and expectation management
Referring to anticipatory aid as a “donation” has created misaligned expectations among some pastoralists—who expected payouts even when vegetation conditions were favorable. During interviews, village champions expressed biased views, likely influenced by the assumption that this was a donation-based program. To avoid this, we plan to replace the term “donation” with “free climate risk protection cover” in future communications. This better reflects the intent: climate-linked support provided at no cost, but not guaranteed.
Auto-roll functionality request
One donor suggested enabling automatic rollover of unused funds into future campaigns, removing the need for manual claiming and redepositing. We’ll explore how this can be implemented to streamline the donor experience.
📈 Impact statistics (since inception)
- $83,219 has been contributed across five campaigns.
- $11,744 (14%) was distributed to beneficiaries (during the Q4 2023 MCV pilot campaign).
- On average, 222 pastoralists were protected per rainy season, with free coverage worth $75 each.
🤝 Join the cause
The DIVA Donate team is actively seeking partners who share our vision of harnessing blockchain technology to provide effective support to vulnerable communities affected by climate change. Given the versatile nature of DIVA Protocol, the smart contract powering DIVA Donate, the donation payout can be linked to virtually any metric and adapted to many different use cases.
If you represent a charity or NGO passionate about this concept, reach out and join forces to provide more efficient and effective support to those in need.
🌖 Conclusion
The successful completion of the 5th DIVA Donate campaign underscores our ongoing commitment to increasing the climate resilience of vulnerable communities through blockchain technology. We are grateful for the support and generosity of all contributors. 🙏 Stay tuned for the 6th campaign (Oct-Dec 2025).
🍀 About DIVA Donate
DIVA Donate is an innovative platform that leverages blockchain technology to enable parametric conditional donations for pre-disaster preparedness and relief. It is a joint initiative between two entities united around the mission of empowering vulnerable communities affected by climate change through anticipatory support that activates before disasters strike:
- Fortune Credit: a microfinance institution in Kenya which provides credit, insurance & other financial services to 50k+ customers including small-holder farmers & pastoralists, and
- DIVA Technologies AG: developer of DIVA Protocol, a smart contract-based system for creating and managing custom derivative contracts peer-to-peer.