With content from guest blogger, Arun Maharajan
The Primero DAO: A new type of digital community
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are shaking up the digital world. Imagine a future where decisions are made collectively, resources are managed transparently, and everything runs smoothly without a "middleman". DAOs, powered by blockchain and smart contracts, promise fairness and accountability. They have been successfully used to innovate many areas of modern life, including governance mechanisms with transparent voting, community engagement, money and fundraising, and accounting. All of this makes DAOs a powerful tool for any community driven, impact generating, real world public good.
The UNICEF Ventures team, Primero, and Xcapit spent the last 1.5 years working together to pilot a DAO that supports Digital Public Goods and contributes to the Sustainable Development Goals. This is the story of the Primero DAO.
How can we be sustainable and "future-ready" if our community isn't driving Primero development?
The Primero DAO brought together colleagues from 18 organizations - including UNICEF, UNHCR, Save the Children, International Rescue Committee, the Danish Refugee Council, the Child Protection Area of Responsibility, and others - around this new initiative. This community consisted of technologists, end users, implementing partners, and government workers sharing ideas, problem statements, and proposals over the course of a year and half. They joined from Cambodia, from Ukraine, from Kenya and from Indonesia. Where were the sticky issues? How could this community help surface pain points that the global team might not be aware of? What channels existed to shift priorities based on the needs of the field, not just those of the core product team? How do we manage product development when those contributing code are new to our community or on the other side of the planet?
Who is ready for a pilot? Let's go!
The team and the product were primed to experiment and to learn. The Primero DAO was designed to achieve the following objectives and respond to these questions:
- Retaining relevance – Being a multi-agency, multicountry tool with thousands of stakeholders, can the central Primero think tank make relevant decisions by involving their community in an open DAO discussion forum?
- Technical sustainability – While Primero has benefitted from hundreds of altruistic contributions of time/effort to develop their code/content base, can this be made more sustainable and focused by incentivizing contributions from the wider developer community (through mechanisms such as bounty programs) in exchange for digital asset rewards?
- Financial sustainability – If Primero is enabled with a digital asset treasury, can we explore options to benefit financially from tapping into the various sources of funding for public goods available in Web3?
Did we succeed? What did we learn? Is there a paradigm shift on the horizon?
Will DAOs become the next big thing in digital development?
DAOs are naturally aligned with many of the principles and practices of digital development. They present unique opportunities in a time when funding and resources for social impact are hard to come by. As of 2025, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) collectively hold approximately $21.4 billion in liquid assets within their treasuries, according to CoinLaw (see here). Many of these DAOs are purpose-driven intentional communities or social enterprises. For example, there are DAOs that support climate financing, DAOs that focus on social equity, and DAOs that support social and economic justice. The World Economic Forum published a white paper in 2023 called DAOs for Impact, stating that these DAOs "Though nascent, Impact DAOs are already driving change, revealing insights about the future of social impact".
As a community committed to making change for the world's most disadvantaged, we are obligated to innovate and explore new options. DAOs are here, they are powerful, and they could change the way we approach digital development.
Check out the full blog by Arun Maharajan, Blockchain lead at the UNICEF Venture Fund.