UNICEF last Friday (10 December) announced its plan to launch a collection of NFTs to commemorate its 75th anniversary. The UN agency will sell 1,000 data-driven NFTs, the UN's largest-ever NFT collection to date. 

“We have to use every tool in the toolbox if we are to reach more children and invest in a better world – including through new ways of fundraising and financing – and the launch of UNICEF’s first global collection of data driven digital tokens will directly support our global efforts to close the digital divide and help give every young person access to the Internet,” said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore.

The NFTs will be sold directly by UNICEF using the ethereum blockchain. Proceeds from the auction and other NFT fundraising scheduled for late 2021 and early 2022 will go towards promising initiatives of the UNICEF Global Office of Innovation. 

This includes the Giga Initiative which aims to connect every school in the world to the Internet using new technologies like low-earth orbit satellites, machine learning and blockchain.

For the NFT launch, UNICEF partnered with Snowcrash Labs and data visualisation scientist and artist Nadieh Bremer, who created the NFT collection called Patchwork Kingdoms. 

The artwork is inspired by Giga’s live maps on school connectivity. The collection of NFTs incorporates data on more than 280,000 schools from 21 countries, and each artwork represents a subset of these schools. This also marks the first time the UN has created NFTs based on data. 

Each piece has a world “above” representing connected schools, and a world ‘below’ for unconnected schools. The squares in the hidden pale “reflection” city represent a lack of connectivity contrasted with the “vibrant” connectivity in schools in the upright city. Meanwhile, the various colours show how many children are still in need of Internet access.