Types of Reward
The Broccoli Project offers rewards that are relevant to the poorest members of our society, typically people surviving on less than $2.00 a day. Consisting of vouchers for groceries, clothing or building materials, these will satisfy the recipients’ basic needs for food and shelter.
In the future we may add education courses and transport vouchers. We may also add to the rewards menu second hand mobile phones that have been retired from use or discarded through upgrades.
Distribution and Redemption of Rewards
Records of rewards and actions are kept in a secure database that is associated with an individual member's profile – almost like a bank account. The value of the stored rewards can be increased by the person performing certain actions or achieving certain goals, and it will automatically be decreased when the voucher is redeemed.
In order to redeem the rewards, the member will present a voucher to the relevant retailer. This voucher may be an actual physical voucher printed on paper, but we are working towards using mostly, or possibly exclusively, virtual vouchers in the future. These may be in the form of smart cards, mobile phone text messages (SMS) or mobile web (WAP) pages.
Although this sounds high tech, the system is designed so that even relatively informal trading operations, such as fresh produce markets, will be able to redeem vouchers using only a mobile phone.
Of course, some people may be tempted to try to defraud the system but we’ve planned for that. Because the credit balance on any voucher is stored centrally, it can only be used once. And if someone tries to be really sneaky, and uses the voucher in two places at the same time, only the first request will work, and any later uses of thones rejected.
Some of our partner retailers are in the process of installing biometric readers at till points so we may, at some stage, incorporate biometric data in the voucher. This would mean that only the person who earned the reward could redeem the voucher. However, it will be a while before all the participating retailers install the technology, so that is still in the future.