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IG World | June 10, 2019

IG World: Ashish Gadnis on How BanQu Is Helping People in Third-World Countries

BanQu’s Ashish Gadnis sits down with IG World to talk about his own experience with poverty and, more importantly, what BanQu is doing to help impoverished people in third-world countries.

Part of BanQu’s “for-profit/for-purpose” mission is to help people in third-world countries connect to the world economy in meaningful ways that could ultimately give them a path out of poverty. In an interview with IG World, BanQu CEO and co-founder Ashish Gadnis explains three of the challenges of such a mission, and what BanQu is doing to tackle those challenges:

We have 3 big challenges that we encounter and overcome every day: First, traditional aid and social enterprise models take a pity approach. We take a dignity approach to ending extreme poverty. So, the challenge is changing the mindset around poverty.

Second, most consumers don’t know that their coffee and jeans and shea butter and iPhone batteries are coming from extreme poverty zones where a family of eight makes less than $2 a day. Our challenge is getting large global brands and their consumers to recognize the “last-mile” in their supply chains.

Finally, while most of the world either loves or hates bitcoin/ cryptocurrencies, there is very little awareness that the underlying technology––distributed ledger technology (DLT, aka blockchain) ––is much more than that. And that non-cryptocurrency blockchain platforms like BanQu are enabling people to climb out of poverty.

Read the full interview on the IG World website.

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