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:
- Import land title records
- Import cadastral map data
- Mint Cardano NFT
- Add/correct cadastral map data
- Publish cadastral maps
- Register new land title records
- Verify land ownership right
- Transfer land ownership right
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:
- migrate existing DUAT records and data into Landano
- develop Landano interface for ad hoc DUAT imports
- mint DUAT NFTs on Cardano
- provide secure archival storage
- provide cadastral map interfaces
- provide a mobile-friendly interface
- provide Portuguese interface translations
- allow users to prove their rights to occupation
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:
- Miscoordination between People’s Cadastre and Landano teams.
- Complexity of DUAT source data. Time to map, export, and quality control.
- Project kick-off is contingent on Landano MVP delivery schedule.
- Users have low levels of literacy, smartphone ownership, electricity, internet connectivity
- Need bridge between end-users' mobile pay systems and crypto-currencies
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.