Lumu Emmanuel Roy Muyingo A, Brenda Nabachwa B, Faith Mugisha Ahabyoona C
This study evaluates the Parish Development Model (PDM) as a decentralized rural development initiative aimed at enhancing the economic empowerment of coffee smallholder farmers in Hoima District, Uganda. Using a convergent mixed-methods approach, the research integrates Sen’s Capability Approach, Resilience Theory, and Social Capital Theory to examine three dimensions: institutional support, resource capacity building, and community engagement. Quantitative data were collected from 278 farmers through stratified random sampling, while qualitative insights were obtained from 12 key informant interviews and 8 focus group discussions. Findings indicate that while PDM has improved coffee yields by 37% among beneficiaries and strengthened trust in SACCOs with transformational leadership, significant barriers persist, including elite capture, gender-based land tenure disparities, and low uptake of climate-smart practices. Policy recommendations include community-vetted beneficiary selection, gender-responsive governance measures, and climate-resilient financing. The results offer lessons for scalable decentralized development models applicable in ASEAN and other Global South contexts.
BACKGROUND: In the homeless population, barriers to housing and supportive services include a lack of control or access to data. Disparate data formats and storage across multiple organizations hinder up-to-date intersystem access to records and a unified view of an individual's health and documentation history. The utility of blockchain to solve interoperability in health care is supported in recent literature, but the technology has yet to be tested in real-life conditions encompassing the complex regulatory standards in the health sector. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to test the feasibility and performance of a blockchain system in a homeless community to securely store and share data across a system of providers in the health care ecosystem. METHODS: We performed a series of platform demonstrations and open-ended qualitative feedback interviews to determine the key needs and barriers to user and stakeholder adoption. Account creation and data transactions promoting organizational efficiency and improved health outcomes in this population were tested with homeless users and service providers. RESULTS: Persons experiencing homelessness and care organizations could successfully create accounts, grant and revoke data sharing permissions, and transmit documents across a distributed network of providers. However, there were issues regarding the security of shared data, user experience and adoption, and organizational preparedness for service providers as end users. We tested a set of assumptions related to these problems within the project time frame and contractual obligations with an existing blockchain-based platform. CONCLUSIONS: Blockchain technology provides decentralized data sharing, validation, immutability, traceability, and integration. These core features enable a secure system for the management and distribution of sensitive information. This study presents a concrete evaluation of the effectiveness of blockchain through an existing platform while revealing limitations from the perspectives of user adoption, cost-effectiveness, scalability, and regulatory frameworks.
More than 500,000 people experience homelessness in America each day. Local and federal solutions to the problem have had limited success because of the fragmentation of services and lack of valid and timely information. Billions of dollars spent to provide reliable, timely, and actionable information in health care have exposed the difficulty of establishing such a system using the prevalent information technology solutions. However, relying on successful examples of the use of blockchain to help refugee populations and poor farmers internationally, we have partnered to propose an innovative solution to this problem using the case of people experiencing homelessness in Austin, Texas. This paper aims to describe one of the first applications of blockchain technology for addressing homelessness in the United States by creating a digital identity for people experiencing homelessness and engaging emergency medical services and clinical providers. The authors argue that a lack of documentation to prove personal identity and the inability to access own records are major hurdles for empowering persons experiencing homelessness to be resilient and overcome the life challenges they face. Furthermore, it is argued that this lack of information causes misdiagnosis, duplication, and fragmentation in service delivery, which can be potentially addressed by blockchain technology. Further planning for creating a program on the ground with additional funding will demonstrate the results of using blockchain technology to establish digital identity for persons experiencing homelessness.