Last updated a year ago
The rural poor in Mozambique do not have an accessible and affordable way to assert their land rights using government systems.
Import Mozambican land right documents onto Cardano to create a People's Cadastre using Landano for NFT minting, maps, and web3 storage.
This is the total amount allocated to A People's Cadastre in Mozambique ✊.
The People’s Cadastre is a solution for the rural population of Mozambique. This includes over twenty million people. Ninety-five percent of them live and farm on land which remains unmapped and undocumented.
Poor, rural households are unable to access the national land administration system, which is remote, expensive and dysfunctional.
These people cannot leverage their land rights to improve their economic and social security. Documentation of these rights in a trustworthy digital format would enable them to build a path out of poverty and access mortgages, lines of credit, and decentralized finance (DeFi) products.
The People’s Cadastre team has developed a digital rights registry based on Mozambique’s unique Land legislation. This law enables community-declared right declarations (DUATs). The custom system currently holds 80,000 DUAT records. To connect these to DeFi opportunities, they will be minted on the Cardano blockchain.
The proposed solution is to migrate the existing DUATs into the Landano product. Landano is an independent registry of land rights that mints legal instruments on the Cardano blockchain. It also provides web3 archival storage and discovery. Landano is conducting a Project Catalyst Fund 7 pilot project in Ghana, Africa to produce the Minimum Viable Product that will be implemented in Mozambique. This includes:
Landano is a solution to the data quality problem in land administration. It provides reliable, open data to support land management in an easy-to-query, mobile-friendly interface supported by maps, permanent archival records, and blockchain integrity checks.
The first phase of this proposed People’s Cadastre solution will be focused on migrating existing DUAT data into Landano. We are proposing to:
A subsequent development phase will allow for changes to registered DUAT rights and leveraging them for financial services.
This proposal to introduce a People’s Cadastre in Mozambique using Landano is in direct alignment and support of the Nation Building dApp challenge.
Trustworthy land policy is a key prerequisite for stable governance. A high-quality, reliable web3 application to manage land rights will stabilize and grow rural farming economies in Mozambique.
This project will bring 80,000 existing Mozambican land right declarations on-chain as Cardano minted NFTs while setting the stage for adding up to 20 million more. This project has the potential to establish Cardano as the leading blockchain for developing Nation Building infrastructure.
We will publicize the outcomes of this project on our blogs and social media profiles. Project members will be available for interviews and we will report noteworthy findings for peer review.
The primary challenges facing our project are:
To mitigate these risks we have been holding weekly project meetings to coordinate tasks and deliverables. The Landano team has adopted agile development tooling to manage scheduling risks for the data migration and MVP development. The Mozambican team has significant experience and tooling for onboarding a user community with minimal technical requirements. This same lo-fi design approach will be applied to ongoing data collection, access, and system interfaces.
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TOTAL BUDGET: $98,450
Our team believes in equal pay for all the human resources that are contributing to delivering the tasks and products on our roadmap. We have decided on the rate of $75 per hour as a fair reflection of the team's significant and unique expertise as well as in consideration of our living costs and earning potential outside Project Catalyst.
Our team members will provide their own computing equipment. Free and open-source software source code will be used to develop the solution. Hosting for the project website and code repositories are provided free of charge via Github. Community outreach will be done via Twitter and YouTube accounts as well as the various Project Catalyst communication channels.
Simon Norfolk, Project Lead - People's Cadastre
Simon is a lawyer originally from the UK and now a Mozambican national who operates Terra Firma as a land rights consultancy. He has been involved in African land tenure issues for the past two decades. Simon saw the opportunity provided by Mozambique's unique land law and took action to implement the People's Cadastre. He has since helped 80,000 rural Mozambicans declare their land rights. Simon is eager to scale out a secure platform for 20 million more Mozambicans and help them connect these declarations to blockchain-based DeFi opportunities.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonnorfolk/
Maria Muianga, Data Management Lead - People's Cadastre
Maria is a forestry engineer that manages the People's Cadastre data and software stack for Terra Firma. She will provide critical experience for exporting data into Landano and validating DUAT functionality.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maria-muianga-b82b5658/
Peter Van Garderen, System Architect - Landano
Peter is co-founder of Landano. He is a professional archivist and a world-renowned expert in the field of digital records management. He is currently applying this expertise to the design of the Landano Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in Ghana. Peter will apply this experience to make Landano viable for the Mozambican context.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/petervangarderen/
Dorus Van Der Kroft, Software Lead - Landano
Dorus is co-founder of Landano. He is an expert consultant for the Mendix low code platform and a full stack developer with over twenty years of industry experience delivering projects from start to finish. His broad set of software engineering skills have been used in start-ups and large enterprises.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dorus/
Abdul Razak, Software Developer - Landano
Razak is a coder, GIS analyst, and geospatial engineer. He has over 10 years experience developing software products and implementing geospatial tools. He is an active member of the Wada Alliance which promotes Cardano adoption throughout Africa.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/razakalhassan/
Nana Safo, Software Developer - Landano
Nana is a Landano community ambassador and software developer. He is an active member of the Wada Alliance which promotes Cardano adoption throughout Africa.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nana-kwadwo-safo-30114517a/
The project will be done when
This project will re-use software delivered through the Catalyst Fund 7 Nation Building dApp grant for Landano.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/aLQPTPrcQscThe Fund7 grant proposal:
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/381957
For progress see:
https://twitter.com/landanodapp
The People's Cadastre is the next phase for the Mozambican CaVaTeCo project led by local company Terra Firma. It has already collected community-declared rights for over 80,000 property owners in rural Mozambique. For more progress on this land rights collection phase see: https://sites.google.com/terrafirma.co.mz/cavateco-resultados/home
This proposal addresses severable SDGs but first and foremost it is a direct response to
Goal 1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere
The SDG has a KPI (1.4.2) for "Proportion of total adult population with secure tenure rights to land" because it's recognized as a stepping stone to SDG 1.4: ensuring all men and women have equal rights to economic resources by 2030.
NB: Monthly reporting was deprecated from January 2024 and replaced fully by the Milestones Program framework. Learn more here
We are experienced lawyers, community activists, and Cardano software developers. The Mozambique team has already collected over eighty thousand land right declarations into a custom Cadastre system. The Landano team will use its platform to mint and store these as Cardano NFTs.