A chat with David, co-founder of Chatafisha – a Refi organization in Tanzania; on the activities of Chatafisha and how they are changing the lives of waste pickers in Tanzania through regeneration and financial inclusion.

Hi, can we meet you?

My name is David Machuche, I Am from Dar es salaam Tanzania. Co-Founder at Chatafisha alongside super regens Simalike Musika, and Victor Muhagachi in Tanzania. I am a Web3 ecosystem builder and regenerator, with a background in innovation management.

I am passionate about onboarding people in my community to use disruptive technologies such as Web3 for real-world use cases such as environmental regeneration and financial inclusion in marginalized communities.

Let's talk about Chatafisha, tell us what the community does

As with the case with Chatafisha, we strive to tackle the growing crisis in climate such as carbon emissions as well as onboard regenerators in marginalized communities such as waste pickers and others, to actualize proof of impact by storing their regenerative impact on-chain.

We are building an infrastructure for proof of the impact of regenerative work. We offer organizations and individuals the chance to calculate and offset their footprint through verified projects such as the work of waste pickers, clean cooking stoves, waste regeneration, renewable energy, and more.

The goal is to streamline the projects through permissionless credit class methodologies to enable them to attain ecological credits for the work they do. We offer the organizations and individuals offsetting impact certificates of the work done in the form of Carbon backed NFTs with all the relevant data such as the name of the regenerator, type of waste, amount, location, level of impact, etc

For some people, Regenerative finance (Refi) is a new concept to them. Is it different from defi & nft? Why did Chatafisha choose Refi?

We are actually at the intersection of ReFi, DeFi, and NFTs. Regenerative Finance consists of any activity that aims at finding a resolution between economic activity and its ecological implications, redistributing positive-sum benefits back into marginalized communities in an equitable way.

Most of these marginalized communities such as waste pickers remain largely unbanked, and we are looking to financially include them through sub wallets where they can have scores tied to them from the collected data and make them eligible for micro-lending in the long run.

We use carbon-backed NFTs as proof of impact or impact certificates. The transparency aspect of blockchain enables us to safely secure, store, and track impact data. The goal is to gamify and implement a verify2earn model here where anyone can get incentivized for their regenerative impact. At Chatafisha, we are all about embracing people and the planet first

How receptive have Tanzanians been toward the work Chatafisha does? Do they actively participate?

Interestingly, the pilots we have done have been very successful with waste pickers for instance, very happy and open to exploring new technologies such as storing their information on-chain (they normally use pen and paper) as well as sub-wallets, if it will enable them to live a better life and earn a stable basic wage, from $0.10 per kg of waste which is unfair and unsustainable in the long run, on top of working in poor conditions and poor legal frameworks towards their industry.

Though some are skeptical about the technological part of operating the digital platform, using feature phones, which is an issue we plan to address along our roadmap.

What next for Chatafisha?

We have just rolled out our carbon-backed NFT marketplace, and we are on the road to illustrating Web3 real-world use cases in marginalized communities. We have also been onboarded to Regen Network’s cohort of community-staking DAOs to create a permissionless credit class methodology for waste regeneration that can be replicated not only in Tanzania but the whole of the global south.

This will massively solve challenges such as barriers to entry with high costs through the decentralized nature of the new credit classes and disruptive technologies such as dMRV.

I must commend the outstanding and brilliant work Chatafisha is doing. This is so different and refreshing from other projects in web3
Bravo to the entire Chatafisha Team!

Is Chatafisha accepting new members? If so, how can one be part of the community? Care to share links to the community's social handles?

Certainly! We operate as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization and are looking to do so as much as possible to see and actualize impact in various communities all over not only Tanzania but the whole of Africa.

We highly encourage everyone passionate about change in their community, ReFi, and Web3 real-world use cases to join us!
Our X handle is @chatafisha,
Telegram https://t.me/+yfCBKOAXcRNhZjRh
Instagram @chatafisha_dao.