Articles
Blog articles
Blockchain: an opportunity to improve the traceability of sustainable cocoa in Côte d’Ivoire
Lack of traceability is a major issue in the cocoa sector in Côte d’Ivoire. The French NGO, Nitidae, believes that blockchain could provide a solution that would fight fraud and promote ethical production. With the support of CTA and blockchain specialists, Gaiachain, Nitidae carried out a project, from February 2019 to April 2020, with a cooperative in the Mé region of Côte d’Ivoire to develop and test a blockchain traceability application. Here is an initial assessment of the ‘Cocoblock’ experience.
Read Morehiveonline: working with communities to help them access credit
by Jaclyn Bolt and Chris Addison
hiveonline is a digital platform that builds financial trust. This young start-up works with NGOs, merchants and microfinance institutions to help support small business ecosystems. The goal is to help communities grow by giving them access to credit and markets. We spoke with Sofie Blakstad, CEO and founder of hiveonline, about her initiative and the role of blockchain technology.
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Creating frictionless supply chains
by Jaclyn Bolt and Chris Addison
Binkabi is a platform for the issuing, trading and financing of commodities on the blockchain. CEO and founder, Quan Le, spoke with us to explain the ins and outs of the application and provide some advice for others interested in taking up blockchain technology.
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BenBen Ghana: Empowering citizens by providing land security
by Jaclyn Bolt
Founded in 2015, BenBen is a Ghanaian-based land tenure and property tech start-up. BenBen leverages distributed ledger technology (DLT) in building digital platforms for securing land-based assets and financial transactions in African land markets. BenBen’s vision is to build the digital infrastructure to enable African economies to fully unlock the socio-economic potential of their land and create ethical land markets.
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Blockchain for agriculture: making it happen
by Chris Addison , Ken Lohento and Claudia Ayim
The increasing buzz on blockchain technology has, in recent times, drawn attention to its application within the agriculture sector. The technology can be leveraged upon to improve agriculture efficiency, effectiveness, and transparency in Africa, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries, including intra-ACP business transactions and transactions between ACP and international business stakeholders.
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Impact Stories
Blockchain summit spurs uptake of digital innovations for agriculture
The Strike Two summit, a series of events showcasing digital innovations for the food system, has given CTA and partners a launchpad to demonstrate the transformative potential of blockchain for small-scale agriculture, and establish a growing global community that aims to accelerate its adoption.
Read MoreICT Update
Eliminating the trust factor
Henk van Cann is co-founder of Blockchain Workspace, an organisation based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands that provides training on the blockchain to make the technology understandable to a broad audience. Henk spoke to ICT Update about the need to educate people in the use of the blockchain before they start using it and judging it, and why trust is one of the key drivers for moving away from centralised systems and towards blockchain technology.
Read MoreAssessing the need for blockchain applications
Using the Oxford Blockchain Strategy Framework, Nikolet Zwart has analysed a use case of adding value through the local processing of food by multinational agribusinesses to illustrate the usefulness of any kind of blockchain analysis.
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The blockchain: opportunities and challenges for agriculture
Nathalie Toulon from the AgroTIC Digital Agriculture Chair in France discusses the many ways in which the blockchain can potentially change agriculture, for example by enhancing trust, transparency and efficiency, and several pitfalls to take into account. Like any new technology, blockchain should not be viewed as a panacea. For it to serve development, it will need to mature.
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Cryptocurrency: more education, less hype
by John Weru
John Weru is a Kenya-born writer, blogger and co-founder of PayHub East Africa. In a conversation with ICT Update, John talked about the rise of cryptocurrency, the potential of the blockchain to improve efficiency in the agricultural value chain in Africa, and the urgent need to educate people about the technology itself and the economy that it is creating.
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Building lives with dignity
by Eva Oakes
Eva Oakes describes Choco4Peace’s experience building a network based on blockchain technology in the cocoa sector in Colombia. The main aim is to get smallholders out of both cocaine production and poverty through access to finance.
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Spore
Blockchain builds trust in agricultural commodity trade
Distributed ledger technology promises to help plug a trust gap in agricultural commodities trade and finance, with new platforms offering farmers a bigger pool of buyers for their harvests.
Read MoreCan blockchain plug Africa’s agri-finance gap?
A group of partners are developing a blockchain-powered ecosystem across Africa that they say will boost investment into agricultural infrastructure, allow smallholder farmers to borrow more cheaply and stimulate consumer activity in rural economies.
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Is the Internet of Things the future of farming?
In ACP countries, the use of smart ‘connected’ devices in agriculture is still at an experimental stage. Yet new projects are emerging, and global trends show how this new technology offers vital development opportunities.
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Blockchain's disruptive potential in ACP value chains
In recent years, new digital technologies such as blockchain have emerged, providing exciting opportunities for improving the ease of doing business in the agricultural sector of ACP countries.
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Events
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Mar 5
Webinar: The future of food supply chains
A webinar about blockchain for agrifood on how the future of supply chains will look like when all of blockchain's potential would come to fruition.
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Jan 16
Webinar: How blockchain can help smallholder farmers get access to digital idendity?
The second blockchain for agrifood webinar, with Puvan J. Selvanathan from Bluenumber and Marieke de Ruyter de Wildt from the StrikeTwo summit, explains how farmers can build up a self sovereign or user centric digital ID.
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Nov 14
Webinar: The 9 ways IOT and blockchain can help smallholder farmers
In support of the StrikeTwo summit series of events and to reach and support those interested in blockchain use in ACP agriculture, CTA is working with Fairfood and The Fork to provide a virtual space for discussion linked to face to face events.…
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Sep 4
African Green Revolution Forum 2019 - Masterclass – Blockchain for smallholder agriculture: Hype or reality?
The masterclass is intended as a briefing to provide the audience with an overview of the following:An idea of the breadth of applications in use which impact agriculture in Africa.The potential positive and negative effects on smallholders.Some of the initiatives being undertaken…
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May 28
Blockchain workshop: Making it happen
The workshop aims at identifying and promoting effective strategies which will ensure successful implementation of blockchain for agriculture initiatives in ACP countries. To achieve this, it discusses the four selected projects of the CTA blockchain call for proposals, develop a common understanding on the key issues that need to be addr…Location:Wageningen, Netherlands
