Paying for the work

Collecting good data is work. Someone walks out to the recorders and back, measures trees in the mud, sits with a spectrogram for an afternoon, or uploads files over a weak connection. GainForest's answer is Conservation Data Income: communities are paid for the environmental data they collect, and the community's data council sets the price. By early 2025 the programme had paid out more than $30,000 to communities, and in some places it paid for the Starlink connection that made the rest possible.

Much of that money has moved as stablecoins, digital dollars that can be sent to a phone without a bank account. While preparing for the XPRIZE finals, the team helped community members set up mobile wallets on the Celo network, where a transfer costs less than a tenth of a cent. At Toca do Tatu in the Amazon, a community member paid at a local supermarket straight from the wallet.

Then there is the Philippines. In Bislig, Surigao del Sur, fisherfolk from two barangays, the smallest unit of local government, work as trained mangrove surveyors with Oceanus Conservation. They are paid 40 pesos per tree surveyed, about 5,000 pesos per survey. In January 2025 two of our colleagues went to see how the money actually reached them.

The route looked like this. Oceanus receives grants in pesos and converts them to USDC, a stablecoin tied to the US dollar, losing some value in the exchange. The money goes to a Decaf wallet run by the project manager, then to two project wallets that community members signed up for on the team's field phones. To get cash, someone travels 35 to 45 minutes to the town centre and withdraws it at a MoneyGram counter. On our visit one person got their money and another was turned away because of a problem with their ID.

A popular mobile wallet, GCash, looked like a shortcut. People could be paid straight to their phones and skip the trip to town. But each transfer cost 1 USDC, about 56 pesos. Add the fee for turning wallet money into cash at a neighbourhood shop, and getting 1,000 pesos into your hand could cost up to 70 pesos. Internet is scarce: most people buy ten minutes of WiFi at a time for a one-peso coin. We offered the option to eleven people. Two were interested. One tried it. In the end that person also chose cash.

None of this means stablecoins failed. The Decaf and MoneyGram route got money to people who have no bank account, and the record of every payment is open for funders to check. Stablecoins tied to local currencies, such as the Philippine PUSO or Brazil's cREAL, could cut the exchange losses. What the trip showed is that the best payment route is the one that puts the most usable money in a person's hand, and only the person being paid can tell you which one that is.

Payment does not have to mean money either. In Kilifi, Kenya, the Grassroots Economics network records mweria, a Mijikenda tradition in which neighbours help one person with a task and the help is later passed on, as digital vouchers that people can exchange within the group.

Three rules come out of all this. Make the trigger visible: the worker should see what was counted and when they will be paid. Count every cost between the funder and the hand, including travel and time. And ask the people being paid which route they want, then ask again in six months.