Use cases of blockchain technology for humanitarian engineering

Abstract

Humanitarian Engineers need innovative methods to make technological interventions for solving societal problems. The emerging blockchain technology has the enormous potential to provide effective interventions in various developmental sectors, including Agriculture, Education, Health, and Transportation. In these sectors, mediators have been considered as one of the impediments for developmental work. Blockchain technology facilitates peerto-peer business transactions, thus eliminating the role of mediators. Hence, the blockchain technology is emerging as an alternative to conventional mediator-centred solutions adopting client-server based Internet technologies. A combination of blockchain technology with other technologies can be used to address domain-specific challenges. For example, the combination of blockchain technology and Internet-of-Thing (IoT) has the potential to monitor the usage of scarce resources such as the level of groundwater and amount of energy consumption. The aims of this chapter are twofold. Firstly, it describes the primary building blocks of blockchain technology. Secondly, it illustrates various use-case scenarios of blockchain technology in the fields of Agriculture, Energy Health and others.