The United Nations runs a Food Program (UN World Food Programme - WFP) as a non-profit organization to feed 80 Million people around the globe in over 80 countries.
Operating at 93% efficiency (93 cents per $1 donated goes to helping people buy food) the organization is going to make heavy use of the Ethereum blockchain to further stretch those funds by reducing transaction fees. The 7 cents per $1 are mostly the result of bank fees and should be drastically reduced or even eliminated once the project is finished.
The use of the Etherum blockchain would allow significant savings for transactions, full transparency to donors and auditors, and a tamper-proof public ledger.
“After the Building Blocks project finished their pilot phase of assisting 10,000 refugees in Jordan in May 2017, they found that they were able to reduce the number of cash transactions from 10,000 upfront payments to the banks to 200 settlement transactions to local retailers per month. This saved the WFP significant money in upfront costs, as well as 1.5% to 3% per transaction,”
Parity Technologies
Parity Technologies is the team behind the Parity Ethereum based blockchain being developed for the UN WFP.
Seeing large projects like this adopt blockchain technologies is great news for not only Ethereum but all blockchain tokens. It also goes to show centralized banking isn't the only viable option in today's market.