SAIL’s first blockchain project will bring digitized, mechanized agriculture to underdeveloped populations
Africa is home to 60% of the world’s arable land, with 900 million hectares suitable for agricultural activities. However, many small holder farmers lack the machinery they need to plow their fields. As a result, most farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa plow their crops by hand.
Enter Hello Tractor: a firm explicitly seeking to build a digital ecosystem and create a marketplace for agricultural equipment in the agricultural sector of Africa and other developing regions1.
Hello Tractor and Boston University are developing a partnership, funded by the Algorand Foundation, which will use blockchain technology (i.e., the Algorand Blockchain) and contract theory to help Hello Tractor improve its digital ecosystem and bring digitized, mechanized agriculture to more of the world’s underdeveloped populations.
This project is the first to combine blockchain technology and contract theory to help organizations surmount institutional and infrastructure problems in Africa, and other developing countries, and while instantiating inclusive digital ecosystems.
The goal of a blockchain based solution is to unify all the stakeholders, the processes, and data. Blockchain was selected as the underlying technology because of its decentralized and distributed nature, transaction finality, immutability of records and ability to provide visibility of data stored to all the network participants based on the roles assigned. Blockchain also orchestrates the execution of workflows through smart contract i.e., agreed upon activities, that are executed in a pre-defined order to complete a given procedure.
This is the Software & Application Innovation Lab’s (SAIL’s) first blockchain-related project. SAIL will be directly involved in the development of a mobile application that expands upon Hello Tractor’s current offerings, providing a digital wallet for end users, that enables cryptocurrency-based transactions by way of an underlying blockchain infrastructure.
We, at SAIL, are excited about the opportunity to have a meaningful and tangible impact on agricultural practices in regions of Africa. Through software development, we get a chance to change lives, while also expanding our internal know-how within our Privacy & Security domain of expertise.
[1] Oliver, Jehiel. “A Mobile App Having an Impact on Food Security in Africa.” Progress. https://sites.tufts.edu/digitalplanet/files/2022/03/Inclusive-Innovation-in-Smallholder-Farming.pdf