Mr. Assad Bajwa, board member of Fairtrade Asia & Pacific, believes tip me is able to double the impact of Fairtrade. Or make the social impact of Fairtrade available to non-certified products. 

So far we are a team consisting of a designer, two developers (front & back-end), a former coordinator of the start-up incubator of the GIZ, advisors of SAP, the Social Impact Lab, Germany´s biggest crowdfunding site Startnext and myself.

We have just returned for our pilot in Pakistan. Together with our partner Ethletic, the fair shoe producer & winner of the Fairtrade-Award 2016, we visited the production site of their sneakers, inspected the infrastructure & needs of workers. Our prototype will be finished at latest in March 2018. After learning from the pilot we have 5 shops who have already agreed on implementing the plug-in and paying a monthly user fee. 

Our goal is to create a software that can analyze an entire supply chain and the workers & farmers involved in it within 6 weeks. 

We are working with the supply chain transparency start-up "sustainabill" and are benefitting both of their know-how and their existing software. They are able to track all the stakeholders (tier) of the chain. The task of tip me is to establish a financial connection from every tier to its workers. Luckily mobile penetration is on the rise around the globe, with 100% growth in rural India 2016. 100% of workers at our pilot in Pakistan have access to mobile banking. 

When the customer gives a tip in the online shop, it is divided into every tier. From there it is equally split to all the workers and sent to their mobile phones. Our financial partner in Pakistan will be "easypaisa", a service with growing popularity used to pay bills electronically, but also gives you the option to cash out at local partners.

Our advisor from SAP, Georg Koester, is part of their innovation lab and currently working with blockchain. We find this technology very fascinating because it provides the transparency needed, but remain realistic. Due to the currently very high transaction costs, at first we will use the blockchain to make transactions visible for the public. We are waiting for the further development of state channels which would make on-chain transactions cheaper. The blockchain partner of the WFP, Parity, assured us this will happen in the next 10 months.

The feedback of the customers has been very positive. In a survey conducted with over 200 participants, 44% of users said they were likely to give a tip on a product. The main reason for to a down-turn was concerns on transparency and fraud. 

Feel free to watch our TEDxTalk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as3bYzxFwV0&t=3s