Visit us at yakera.net.

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Impacted by life in Venezuela — a country scarred with deep inequality — and a broken family, Vladimir Ramirez escaped an abusive home and moved in with his grandmother. She took him in at a young age and made sure that his basic needs were met despite their poverty. In school, Vladimir was a confident leader and always exhibited incredible skills as a storyteller. Yet his future was suddenly thrown into uncertainty when his grandmother passed away shortly after he moved in with her, leaving him in limbo between abuse and poverty. To support himself, he turned to the streets as his only means of making a living. Soon after, he moved from detention centers to prisons in a seemingly never-ending cycle of poverty, violence, and despair. During his most recent sentence, however, Vladimir got a wake-up call when his wife gave him an ultimatum that brought him to clarity. His perspective and actions began immediately improving and, after serving his sentence, Vladimir saved enough money to purchase a motorcycle. He would feel the cool breeze in the empty streets very early in the morning and late at night, as his work as mototaxista began with the sunrise and ended long after sunset. Through a combination of resilience, compassion and entrepreneurial spirit, Vladimir improved his family’s situation. He became a leader in his community and now works hard to bring formerly incarcerated people into places of work and fight for better conditions in the overcrowded, underfunded, and gang-dominated Venezuelan prisons.

That is the story of our friend Vladimir, a mototaxista who earned his life back with hard work and entrepreneurship only to have his motorcycle stolen from him by someone else driven to the point of total desperation by the crisis in Venezuela. Despite doing the right thing, Vladimir is struggling at multiple levels. He has lost his primary means of earning an income, leaving him flat broke in a society where even the most privileged are fighting to make ends meet. He is not alone by any means. 24 pounds lost on average since 2016, over 90% living below the poverty line, and an average monthly income of less than $3 are just a sampling of the most shocking statistics. Venezuela is bad right now. For people like Vladimir, it could get much worse. Vladimir is an example of someone who has taken the brunt of a country in freefall and which presently does not look like it intends to spare anyone. More than that, he demonstrates that even those who do the difficult work for which anyone should be rewarded (like reforming his entire life to become an honest and dedicated entrepreneur against all odds) cannot hope to escape this crisis without assistance. So, when your government looks more like an organized crime syndicate than a benevolent state with an interest in protecting its people, what can you do?

The answer resists simplicity for several reasons. First and foremost, the currency situation in Venezuela is a quagmire. Recently replacing the Bolívar Fuerte (VEF) to curb inflation, the Bolívar Soberano (VES) is also hyperinflating at a meteoric rate (almost 250,000 VES per dollar). This, combined with stifling poverty, has led to an untenable situation where the import and exchange of dollars or other foreign currency is illegal but also the only way that many people can survive. According to Bloomberg, there are more dollars in circulation than bolívars and, even though the banks are required to sell their euros, yuan, or dollars back to the government each week to maintain the value of VES, the average person has little choice but to traffick in the dollars sent back through remittances via cryptocurrency or cash bills smuggled into the country illegally. Maduro himself has “thanked God” that dollarization exists because the bolívar is almost more valuable as kindling right now than as a means of securing goods or services. Dollars are the lifeblood of the consumer economy and, despite being illegal, their value provides some of the only relief from the economic crisis. Foreign aid is grifted, misallocated, and politicized by the regime, dramatically reducing impact on the people that it intends to help. The regime “thanks God” for the dollar as one of the only ways for people to support themselves while it flounders and fails to distribute aid, but at the same time it has prevented the use or exchange of dollars that could benefit Venezuelans. This process has created a catch-22 where the best means of survival for many people can land them in jail. The average Venezuelan is facing the same type of choice that Vladimir had to make. In the face of total abandonment, do you take the only way out — even if it is illegal? I would. So would you. Back to where I started: What to do? What choice do people have when their government prohibits their means of survival and basic economic prosperity while picketing them from foreign aid which might assist them? One option is to work with us and the team at Yakera.

We are creating a platform called Yakera, similar to other crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe or Kickstarter, that addresses some of these problems. It rethinks the way that Venezuelans can gain access to foreign currencies and international donations by allowing individuals to manage and benefit from their own campaigns without being hampered by foreign currency controls or the requirements of existing platforms. Venezuelans struggle to access valuable fiat currencies either in their original form or converted fairly to VES because of inflation and barriers to exchange. They also cannot use most crowdfunding services that could ease this problem because of restrictive banking and residential requirements. GoFundMe, for example, requires an address, bank account, and SSN or equivalent from the United States, Canada, Australia, or European Union to start a campaign. GoFundMe does, however, have almost 12,000 campaigns to benefit Venezuelans on its platform with more being added each day. These campaigns are run by organizations or family members in foreign countries that then have to send the money back to their loved ones or projects in Venezuela, leading to another problem. Venezuelans do not have a chance to advocate for their own needs directly and gain access to an influx of cash that they need to solve immediate challenges in their lives. We know there is a demand and a need here, but there has yet to be someone that can ethically and effectively bridge these gaps. Our goal with Yakera (“gratitude” in Warao, an indigenous language of Venezuela) is to create a platform where people do not experience these limitations, gain a voice to advocate for their needs, and connect with generous donors from abroad who can give them a hand. We hope to create a dynamic where both the donors and applicants on the platform interact as peers, where the donated funds are effectively and securely distributed, and where the ultimate feeling is that of two people walking side by side in the hope of a more prosperous future.

We will accomplish this with a variety of features that make Yakera most appropriate for the Venezuelan context. Currency is the most pressing concern, but we have a plan. As mentioned earlier, Venezuelans abroad often send money back to their families with cryptocurrency. One service for these remittances is a company called AirTM. AirTM, which is used by businesses, families, and most recently Juan Guaidó (the Interim President) to pay people securely using a blockchain, is our answer to foreign currency controls. AirTM converts almost any foreign currency to the preferred currency of the applicants (VES or dollars, for example) and allows the person to receive that money at a fair exchange rate from abroad without inflation or prohibition. A network of “cashiers” in the country help applicants transfer the money to a bank account, withdraw it in cash, or convert it to gift cards in about 15 minutes on average. It can also be stored in an account to prevent inflation when the currency is not yet being spent. By using AirTM to make the donations through our platform, we will be able to eliminate the residential requirements of other crowdfunding platforms and send the money fairly and safely to Venezuelans in need. Unfortunately, AirTM was blocked after Guaidó tried to send $300 hazard pay checks to healthcare workers fighting COVID-19 in Venezuela, but we are working with their team and exploring many options available for providing virtual private networks (VPNs) that applicants can access to withdraw their money. VPNs are already widely accessible and could provide an easy workaround if the ban continues. To ensure security, we have developed a unique, multi-step anti-fraud approach that will evaluate the content of social media accounts or communications with the applicants themselves to either “verify” each campaign or fail to do so. Beyond the social media content, the platform will also corroborate Venezuelan ID information and establish a decentralized system in which applicants and users can provide feedback about the legitimacy of a campaign’s appearance. The perception of users will report back in the algorithm and alert the platform of potentially fraudulent intent. This will not be perfect, but will help many donors direct their funds to campaigns that we know to be legitimate. The goal is to make the platform as accessible as possible while preventing fraud. A critical part of the operation will be managing the advertisement and visibility of the platform so a pool of donors are available to the applicants when they launch their campaigns. The bulk of our budget, aside from overhead and operational costs, will be spent on this advertising. We hope to fully fund each campaign on the platform and intend to advertise as much as possible on Instagram and Facebook to accomplish this goal. Revenue will come from charges on top of the donation (10–20% depending on the amount donated) to ensure that all of the donated money arrives to the applicant (a donation of $10, for example, will cost $12 so that all $10 go to the campaign).

Right now our goal is to raise $7500 for a community trial in Caracas this December and January. We will take on 12 campaigns and two community projects to benefit the El Calvario and greater El Hatillo communities. Vladimir will be one of those campaigns. Each applicant will be able to raise up to $150, while each community project will be able to gain up to $500. We will be coordinating with a local partner called Nutriendo El Futuro to help us facilitate this remote implementation as safely as possible during COVID-19 while still allowing us to have a meaningful trial of the operation. We will not only allow twelve families to create their campaigns and have a more direct relationship with donors, but also support them through the “A-Naruna Community Fund.” The Fund would make thousands of dollars available to match initial donations and establish a set of grants for the community projects to be carried out by local neighborhood groups and Nutriendo El Futuro. Our goal is to test the site, record data on the impact that it has on the community, make necessary improvements, and then to release a more finalized version shortly thereafter. In the long-term we hope to become an alternative for Venezuelans to access the support that they need and to uplift their own voices in spite of the catastrophe. Beyond our impact in Venezuela, we could provide an example of the peer-to-peer, decentralized cash transfers-based aid model as an effective framework for other parts of the developing world that are crafting strategies to empower their people and improve their quality of life. Above all, we would love to see an innovative service with a mission-driven, highly-ethical approach succeed in its goals to provide hope, freedom, and prosperity to people in need.

Visit us at yakera.net.