Search for Common Ground (SFCG) ran a nationwide survey on Youth, Peace and Security in Kenya. To make the research credible across all 47 counties, they needed nearly a thousand young people to respond, and they needed to pay every one of them an incentive on time.

That's where the operational pain started. Three problems show up every time you try to do research at this scale:

1. The administrative load. Almost a thousand individual micropayments through traditional channels means manual data entry, manual reconciliation, and finance staff time that should be going somewhere else.
   
   

2. The settlement lag. International transfers to a country office, then domestic micro-disbursements out from there. By the time the incentive arrives, the respondent has often forgotten what it was for. Weeks, not days.
   
   

3. The data disconnect. Survey responses live in one platform, payment records in another. Two sources of truth, two opportunities for errors, and no clean line from "this person answered" to "this person was paid."

What we deployed

SFCG used the Billy App paired with Coala Pay's Last Mile Aid (LMA) infrastructure.

Respondents finished the survey and entered their M-PESA details directly inside Billy. No second platform, no separate payment form.

Smart contracts batched the payments and routed them from a US-based digital wallet to a local off-ramp provider, who handled the M-PESA payouts. The finance team did not key in a single payment.

Numbers

• 943 respondents successfully compensated across every region of the country.

• 99.7% payment success rate.

• Maximum settlement time of under 2 hours, US to Kenya. Most landed faster.

• 100% on-chain, real-time visibility from disbursement to off-ramp.

• Zero manual data entry for the finance team.

Why this matters beyond Kenya

Most conversations about stablecoin aid focus on crisis response.

This deployment does something different. It shows the same rails work for the unglamorous, high-volume side of programming: research incentives, frontline-worker stipends, community-organisation grants.

The kind of payments where the per-transaction value is small but the count is high and the audit trail has to be airtight.

Built by humanitarians for field realities. Configurable for the operating context. Always optimised for the people the money is supposed to reach.

Looking ahead

Building on this pilot, SFCG can extend Billy and LMA into other country offices and other payment types — from compensating frontline peacebuilders to funding community-based organisations directly. The infrastructure is the same. The use cases are the part that scales.