ABOUT

Shanzhai City is a social development technology holdings company, focused on creating data solutions, products, and services to unlock capital for sustainable development, for both enterprise and grassroots-level clients and users.

Executive Summary PDF

Grass Roots Social Innovation

Will Change the World

Shanzhai City was inspired by the raw creative power of informal economies and grassroots communities that innovate out of necessity to make their lives better – on their own terms – to address needs where mainstream markets fail and centralized systems often lose efficacy. We believe that by catalyzing the energy at the fringes of society and empowering grassroots communities with tools to build data literacy, improve financial inclusion, and coordinate collaborative intentions that we will see the end of poverty and social exclusion in our lifetime.

Shanzhai City and the United Nations

2030 Sustainable Development Goals

We aim to be profitable by doing good for the planet. More specifically, our thesis is to build both data literacy and financial literacy for people in developing markets using distributed ledger technology (DLT) to enable multi-stakeholder participation as the basis to solve widespread problems across different types of developing communities and markets.

With our tools and strategies, we seek to close the 2030 SDG funding gap by bringing data that can unlock investment mandates, and also activating grassroots capital through innovative blockchain-based participatory social finance solutions.

Meet Shanzhai City!

Each team member at Shanzhai City is driven to bring positive change to people’s lives with compassion, sensitivity, and an open heart. We do so by combining expertise in community building, data science, education, strategic planning, business design, urban and rural development and social impact metrics.

Our vision is led by co-founders Tat Lam and Chris Gee, who have been working together for over the past decade in social development by incorporating the grassroots nature of China’s “shanzhai” culture — creativity and innovation defined by local need and the zeitgeist of collective bottom-up intelligence.