The Mozambique Project
Simplify Property Transactions and Secure Your Property Rights with Us Mozambique & the CaVaTeCo System If communities mapped their own territories, would land disputes decrease? Does land tenure security improve economic opportunities within marginalized societies? How do trustworthy, reliable land right records empower people? These key research questions are being answered through the pioneering work done by a Landano partner in Mozambique. Terra Firma is a land-based consultant group based in Mozambique that has developed the Community Land Value Chain (CaVaTeCo) system to equip communities with the ability to map and document ownership of land and natural resources (Landano, 2022). The CaVaTeCo approach utilizes inexpensive tools, like handheld GPS devices and open-source GIS software to encourage community members to engage with the mapping of their traditional lands (Terra Firma, 2018). This innovative project uses a bottom-up approach to land governance and property rights for individuals living in rural areas. This makes it a perfect match for Landano’s own methodology and tools which are now being integrated to add blockchain notarization and DeFi access to CaVaTeCo. Terra Firma has developed CaVaTeCo to take advantage of the unique regulatory environment in Mozambique. There have been an array of major policy decisions that have shaped land administration in this country, including the 1990 Constitution, the National Land Policy of 1995, the Land law of 1997, the Rural Land law of 1998, and more (Norfolk, 2020). Accordingly, land in Mozambique can be divided into two major categories: public lands which are maintained by the government, and community lands maintained by rural communities. The Land law of 1997 enables community-declared right declarations (DUATs). These allow members of local communities to obtain individual plots of land within community lands with the approval of local leaders (USAID, 2018). The CaVaTeCo system has formalized and provided structure to these DUAT declarations. To connect these DUATs and the corresponding parcels of land to DeFi opportunities, they will be minted on the Cardano blockchain as non-fungible tokens (NFT) using the Landano platform. Problems With The Current System Mozambican government agencies and private companies view communities as participants in land management and administration but not as rights-holders (Meij, 2022). This is problematic for individuals seeking to express autonomy over their land and securing opportunities for economic mobility. The rural population of Mozambique includes over twenty million people, ninety-five percent of whom live and farm on land which remains unmapped and undocumented (Tabary, 2018). This creates inherent challenges to proper allocation of land, documentation of land transfers, and equitable distribution of natural resources. Often, individuals living in these areas are unable to access the national land administration system due to the remoteness and cost of travel to government land offices, unaffordable fees for various agents and processes, and a range of bureaucratic and I.C.T. shortcomings. Currently, for most villages throughout Mozambique, land and farms are passed down through family or via informal agreements of land transfers, which are rarely documented (World Bank, 2014). These informal agreements around land management and administration can lead to violence if there is a dispute. Individuals living throughout Mozambique recognize the need for formalized documentation of land. During a 2017 World Bank mapping project in the small town of Meitor, one resident noted, “documentation has planted seeds of trust in the community. And with that trust comes opportunities for cooperation.” (Pimentel, 2020) This lack of documentation excludes rural populations from leveraging their land rights to improve their economic and social security. Tenure security informs people’s livelihoods and decision-making, such as whether to make financial investments into land-based businesses like farms and shops. (Tabary, 2020) In fact, excluding individuals from accessing land rights and tenure security has a multi-generational impact on communities. Land ownership is vital to the development of intergenerational wealth. Documentation of these rights in a trustworthy digital format enables them to build a path out of poverty and access mortgages, lines of credit, and decentralized finance (DeFi) products such as business loans. The Terra Firma and Landano Partnership As an independent registry of land rights that mints ISO standards compliant records on the Cardano blockchain, Landano has become a key partner to Terra Firma and its mission. The two teams are now working to import CaVaTeCo land title records and cadastral map data, mint Cardano NFTs of each DUAT record, publish all available mapping data, register new land title records, as well as transfer and verify land ownership rights. We will also make these maps publicly available for access and re-use outside the Landano platform by local communities and government agencies. 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 authenticity proofs that use blockchain notarization (NFTs). Landano is excited and proud to collaborate with the Terra Firma team in Mozambique and to further enhance the significant real world impact their work has already made.
The Ghana Project
Revolutionizing Land Management in Ghana with Digital Solutions Introducing The Landano Project The Landano project is launching with a pilot project in Ghana, Africa. The Landano mission is to provide economic mobility to marginalized people through better access to land administration systems. Having reliable proof of property rights will provide tenant farmers in rural Ghana with the confidence to invest in their land and improve its yields. It also improves access to financial services like mortgages, loans, and decentralized finance. Ghana is home to 31 million people. It spans from coastal savannas to tropical rain forests, and it is rich in natural resources. Ghana has been one of the more stable and democratic countries in West Africa. It has played a major role in intercontinental trade for many centuries and was the first sub-Saharan country to gain its national independence. The Customary Land Management Framework Prior to colonial rule, the area now known as Ghana was governed by customary law and authority was vested in traditional institutions referred to as stools or skins, family and similar kinship groups. The stool represents the spiritual and physical embodiment of the people. It is regarded as an immortal entity. Stool lands are estimated to constitute about 80% of land holdings in Ghana. This land is held in trust by the head of the community for the entire members of the community, clan or family in the belief that land is owned by the dead, living and those yet unborn. Within this traditional Ghanaian society, land is a spiritual entity that transcends the material realm. The Legal Land Management Framework The legal framework for land administration in Ghana is prescribed in its 1992 Constitution and the 2020 Land Law (Act 1036). These laws are in many ways descendant from European legal traditions, but they also recognize and legitimize traditional land right authorities such as stools, skins, clans, and families. These customary laws operate alongside formal constitutional law in Ghana’s plural legal environment. It is this customary but fully legitimate framework that Landano will work within first, bringing documentation to those furthest from access to their proof of tenure and other land rights. These customary land administration practices, as yet, do not work easily with a bureaucratic framework for land management that includes strictly defined geospatial data, legal documentation, and digital technologies. Like most modern nations, Ghana has been improving its land registry and cadastral systems over the recent decades, including a recent push towards digitization and electronic conveyancing. Landano’s implementation will help this effort immensely. Meanwhile, Ghana continues to experience a number of systemic problems around land tenure security, including: Solution The Landano team believes that these issues can be improved by introducing its higher-quality, blockchain-based records management for land administration using sustainable web3 software. Ghana’s 2020 Land Law establishes Customary Land Secretariats for administering stool lands. It requires community leaders to take on fiduciary responsibilities and comply with documentation procedures. Landano can assist community leaders with fulfilling these record keeping duties, including management of commissions and service fees. It can also help individual land users by facilitating land transactions and providing up-to-date, trustworthy land parcel information that makes it clear what their rights are. Landano began its pilot project work in March 2022 with community outreach in rural Ashanti outside Kumasi. We have made site visits to discuss the needs of local land administrators as well as tenant farmers. We are now working on documenting these user stories to drive our product design decisions. Land administration and requirements Like every sovereign nation, Ghana has its own land administration laws and its own unique customs and procedures. Landano is designed to work across jurisdictions and legal traditions by starting with a generic domain model for land administration. This model helps to structure the documents and data that Landano manages. The fields and labels on its user interface will be customized to be more context-sensitive to a particular country, registry tradition, language, etc. We are also working on adding geospatial unit data to Landano and sharing it via our platform. We will provide more details on these technical developments as we develop them further.
Landano Technical Architecture: What’s New In 2024
Landano is a software platform for creating and managing decentralized land right records using the Cardano blockchain. We created a proof-of-concept application during Landano’s kick-off stage in 2022. We eased from software development in 2023 to focus on better understanding our potential user base, business opportunities, and matching up to investor profiles. We’ve summarized a lot of that activity in this update video. The Landano project is now ready to combine these efforts into a Minimum Viable Product that will perform core Landano functions on Testnet first before launching on Cardano Mainnet for our users in Ghana and Mozambique. This is a good time to check-in behind the curtains and get a better understanding of the technology architecture we’re implementing to deliver the Landano software platform in 2024. The Mendix Solution The Landano MVP we created in 2022 was developed using the Mendix low-code platform. Our CTO Dorus van der Kroft is a senior Mendix consultant and is leading the development and implementation of the Landano software. Over the course of the past two years we did investigate a number of other candidate technologies on which to build our off-chain components to interact with our on-chain Cardano code. However, Mendix is the right fit for a platform like ours, which we consider to be in the enterprise software market, given that we intend to onboard millions of users. Mendix is primarily used to create and manage large portfolios of business-critical applications across organizational and technical boundaries. It is an integrated application platform-as-a-service (aPaaS) offering for designing, building, deploying, and managing enterprise apps. Mendix is classified by Gartner as a low-code application platform that solves complex software development at scale and with speed. Mendix applications are cloud native by default making all components built on the platform very scalable, resilient, and portable. The low-code methodology also means developers can use Mendix to deliver software quickly to ensure that products and services are brought to market faster while optimizing operational processes. The platform is accessible to developers and administrators through the Developer Portal, which provides access to apps as well as services for requirements management, development, and deployment in the operation and administration of apps and app services. The platform includes Mendix Studio Pro as well as the Mendix Marketplace, which features hundreds of publicly available building blocks to speed up development. The Landano project received a Project Catalyst Fund 11 grant recently to leverage the work we have done so far with our Landano platform to create generic Cardano plugins for the Mendix Marketplace using our Landano code. This will allow the large ecosystem of Mendix enterprise developers to use Cardano NFTs and smart contracts from within the Mendix development environment directly. This sub-project holds a lot of potential for bringing in new enterprise software development talent into the Cardano ecosystem. Mendix allows our Landano team to develop on one core code base and use it to deliver both desktop and mobile applications. You can find the most recent version of our mobile apps in this Github repo. Keep in mind that this is still the experimental proof-of-concept version at the moment. Deployment Architecture Mendix Cloud is a PaaS-based cloud offering based on Cloud Foundry technology that runs on the IaaS layer of Amazon Web Services. Our Landano Mendix application runs in a container provided by Cloud Foundry. These have standard support for horizontal and vertical scaling as well as auto-healing. Scaling up and down can be done without any downtime by simply adding or removing containers. The Mendix Cloud Foundry layer is deployed in multiple availability zones for each AWS region. An availability zone is a physical data-center location of AWS within a region. A Mendix application needs a database and file storage to operate. In the Mendix Cloud, these aPaaS services are directly consumed from the AWS service layer. For the database, the Mendix Cloud makes use of RDS PostgreSQL, and for the file storage, it makes use of S3. Both of these services are Multi-AZ configured, so data is replicated across data centers. All this Mendix infrastructure is used as a processing pipeline for the Landano application modules. There are no permanent records stored within the Mendix platform. The records generated by Landano are stored as Cardano NFTs with supporting documentation packages provided on the permissionless Arweave storage network. This is described further below. The Landano platform and the Mendix plug-ins we are creating allow low-code developers to combine the best of battle-tested enterprise software with the trust guarantees provided by the decentralized Cardano blockchain through its eUTXO NFTs and smart contracts. Domain-driven Development Mendix enables model-driven development through Mendix Studio Pro, which provides visual drag-and-drop development tools for workflows, user interfaces, data, logic, and navigation using no-code and low-code development. Mendix interprets the resulting model at runtime thereby maintaining the bond between model and application which improves greatly upon managing legacy code and technical debt once a platform is in production. Direct model execution also removes code generation overhead and provides significant advantages by accommodating live changes and consistency checks, controlled extensions, and dynamic monitoring analysis at runtime. The Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) Landano software and record-keeping requirements are ISO standards compliant to ensure the sustainability, interoperability, credibility and legal value of the land right documentation it creates and manages. The foundational model that drives the Landano domain is based on ISO standard 19152, the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM). The LADM provides a standardized global vocabulary and entity model for land administration. It has become the predominant reference standard for land administration software systems. Landano has implemented the LADM as a Mendix domain underpinning our business logic. In addition to managing the domain model, Mendix Studio allows our developers to create responsive user interfaces from a declarative interface. This helsp to ensure standardized browser compliance across the various device interfaces that Landano is accessible on. The last component of note is the Mendix-Arkly interface. Arkly is a platform developed in collaboration with the Landano team to provide permanent, decentralized document storage on the Arweave network. Blockchain applications
Improving Land Security In Mozambique
If communities mapped their own territories, would land disputes decrease? Does land tenure security improve economic opportunities within marginalized societies? How do trustworthy, reliable land right records empower people? These key research questions are being answered through the pioneering work done by a Landano partner in Mozambique. The CaVaTeCo System Terra Firma is a land-based consultant group based in Mozambique that has developed the Community Land Value Chain (CaVaTeCo) system to equip communities with the ability to map and document ownership of land and natural resources (Landano, 2022). The CaVaTeCo approach utilizes inexpensive tools, like handheld GPS devices and open-source GIS software to encourage community members to engage with the mapping of their traditional lands (Terra Firma, 2018). This innovative project uses a bottom-up approach to land governance and property rights for individuals living in rural areas. This makes it a perfect match for Landano’s own methodology and tools which are now being integrated to add blockchain notarization and DeFi access to CaVaTeCo. Terra Firma has developed CaVaTeCo to take advantage of the unique regulatory environment in Mozambique. There have been an array of major policy decisions that have shaped land administration in this country, including the 1990 Constitution, the National Land Policy of 1995, the Land law of 1997, the Rural Land law of 1998, and more (Norfolk, 2020). Accordingly, land in Mozambique can be divided into two major categories: public lands which are maintained by the government, and community lands maintained by rural communities. The Land law of 1997 enables community-declared right declarations (DUATs). These allow members of local communities to obtain individual plots of land within community lands with the approval of local leaders (USAID, 2018). The CaVaTeCo system has formalized and provided structure to these DUAT declarations. To connect these DUATs and the corresponding parcels of land to DeFi opportunities, they will be minted on the Cardano blockchain as non-fungible tokens (NFT) using the Landano platform. Mozambican government agencies and private companies view communities as participants in land management and administration but not as rights-holders (Meij, 2022). This is problematic for individuals seeking to express autonomy over their land and securing opportunities for economic mobility. The rural population of Mozambique includes over twenty million people, ninety-five percent of whom live and farm on land which remains unmapped and undocumented (Tabary, 2018). This creates inherent challenges to proper allocation of land, documentation of land transfers, and equitable distribution of natural resources. Often, individuals living in these areas are unable to access the national land administration system due to the remoteness and cost of travel to government land offices, unaffordable fees for various agents and processes, and a range of bureaucratic and I.C.T. shortcomings. Currently, for most villages throughout Mozambique, land and farms are passed down through family or via informal agreements of land transfers, which are rarely documented (World Bank, 2014). These informal agreements around land management and administration can lead to violence if there is a dispute. Individuals living throughout Mozambique recognize the need for formalized documentation of land. During a 2017 World Bank mapping project in the small town of Meitor, one resident noted, “documentation has planted seeds of trust in the community. And with that trust comes opportunities for cooperation.” (Pimentel, 2020) This lack of documentation excludes rural populations from leveraging their land rights to improve their economic and social security. Tenure security informs people’s livelihoods and decision-making, such as whether to make financial investments into land-based businesses like farms and shops. (Tabary, 2020) In fact, excluding individuals from accessing land rights and tenure security has a multi-generational impact on communities. Land ownership is vital to the development of intergenerational wealth. Documentation of these rights in a trustworthy digital format enables them to build a path out of poverty and access mortgages, lines of credit, and decentralized finance (DeFi) products such as business loans. The Terra Firma and Landano partnership As an independent registry of land rights that mints ISO standards compliant records on the Cardano blockchain, Landano has become a key partner to Terra Firma and its mission. The two teams are now working to import CaVaTeCo land title records and cadastral map data, mint Cardano NFTs of each DUAT record, publish all available mapping data, register new land title records, as well as transfer and verify land ownership rights. We will also make these maps publicly available for access and re-use outside of the Landano platform by local communities and government agencies. 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 authenticity proofs that use blockchain notarization (NFTs). Landano is excited and proud to collaborate with the Terra Firma team in Mozambique and to further enhance the significant real world impact their work has already made.