Chained Lands Foundation

Bringing a peaceful campaign to crisis communities with a Blockchain solution that registers landmarks in secured ledgers.

In a state of 3.738 million people, Cross River State in South-South Nigeria, the home of tourism and hospitality in Nigeria has been sacked by communal crises over landmarks. Hundreds of individuals have lost their lives, farmlands have been destroyed, villagers have been displaced and the price of staple food has hit 200% high. In the United Nation's UN-DESA, 2014 brief, 'Peace is an enabling condition for sustainable development while violent conflict is one of the greatest obstacles to the achievement of the MDGs. The gap in MDG performance between conflict-affected and other developing countries is large and increasing.

By 2015, more than 50 percent of the world's poor are likely to live in conflict-affected and fragile states and this percentage is projected to increase to 82 per cent by 2025.' Chained Lands Foundation wishes to restore peace to the crisis communities through its innovative use of Blockchain Technology to approach the crisis communities with a campaign to educate locals on the need to shun communal wars due to landmark issues and to understand how Blockchain has made communal land registry transparent and accessible to the public domain with any mobile device.

The innovation functions well with the collaboration of the State Boundary Commission which provides the land registries of all the local government areas, while our development team leverages on tamper-proof capability of the Blockchain technology to register all documented areas and work in collaboration with the stakeholders to capture the undocumented areas into the Blockchain ledger.

We are leveraging Blockchain technology which has not been deployed in the area of land registry in Nigeria. Considering the solution it will bring to crisis communities in terms of land registry, we have a very viable competitive positioning as to the outcome.
The national boundary commission of Nigeria would have been our competitors, but with the implementation approach we are taking they are our partners and we have ascertained that they do not have the needed technological expertise to compete with our team to deploy a project with the Blockchain technology.

The solution incorporates many key benefits of the technology, such as immutable records, so that no one can authenticity; records are permanently linked to the system so no one can ever tamper with or forge a record of their own; and these records can be seen by any party, at any time.
For the proof of concept, we're leveraging the inherent benefits of the Ethereum Blockchain. This will create a single source of truth of communal land ownership status that must have been endorsed by the state government and other stakeholders, and history of the communal land.

We seek to raise government's attention to the security of farmlands with state policies to back our blockchain land registry technology and campaign.
With technological advancement in the areas of agriculture, farmers are provided with mechanized farming seminars and workshops, and young people have taken more to agriculture with a desire to thrive and increase the economy, but the outcomes have not been remarkable because of the recorded role of communal land crisis. We aim to close that gap of communal land crisis and change the outcomes with our resettlement strategy.

Our 5-year vision:
i. Implement a communal land registry ledger system secured and driven by the Blockchain Technology, covering all 18 local government areas in the state.
ii. Restore 50% of locals back to their communities of displacement through a series of campaigns and government policies collaboration.
iii. Set up strategic offices in the municipal councils of all 18 local government areas, with monitoring teams employed from the host communities to monitor to carry out campaigns and counseling sessions.
iv. Implement our scaling plan acorss all 18 local government areas with a 90-staff workforce, achieving a 90% campaign growth.

The Chained Lands Foundation's purpose to is to empower the people of Nigeria who are undergoing these issues of land crisis. Over 25% of Cross River State rural citizens live below the level of poverty.
We aim to bring government attention to farmland security with state policies to back our blockchain land registry technology and campaign. The record of food-insecure people has continually grown as recent records of communal crisis shows a steady increase in the neglect of farmlands. With technological advancement in the areas of agriculture, farmers and young people will be provided with mechanized farming seminars and workshops.

Through Chained Lands Foundation, citizens engaged in commercial farming in the communal areas will have their lands restored by the first process of partnership with government, community leaders and other stakeholders. This is the first impact we wish to achieve.
The second phase which is the development of the Blockchain application will neither require any Blockchain accounts or wallets nor will the rural settlers experience a change in the way they access other online websites like Facebook, Google and the likes.

Echa Emmanuel (Chairman) and Ogban Usang (Secretary Board of Trustees) are both IT experts with experiences spanning ten years.
Echa demonstrates 12 years of working in the IT service industry. He is a knowledge Broker/Blockchain developer with Songhai Labs, implementing knowledge in IT, developing IT Strategy in complex environments. He has degrees in Computer Science and training on Social Entrepreneurship, human-centered design and prototyping. He joined Songhai Labs as a Knowledge Broker motivated by his passion for Innovation and to identify opportunities in the use of IT and implementing Blockchain technology use cases in key sectors to broaden Africa's economy.

Chained Lands Foundation will implement the following strategies to achieve its goal of developing a communal land registry ledger system secured and driven by Blockchain Technology through the following:
1. Create a compelling value proposition for sponsors, stakeholders, government representatives and partners to join the fight of achieving a peaceful Cross River State.
2. Leverage the opportunity presented by MIT to get the world stage to know about our solution. We have applied to other sources of funding to develop a strong seed stage base while all MOU and technological aspects are still been developed.
3. Blockchain is our choice of technology for its tamper proof and auditable properties, and without the influence of any stakeholder or government but yet available to the public.
4. We have an 'A-list' of experienced professionals from the IT world to maintain the Blockchain ledger system over time.
We intend to replicate the Chained Lands Foundation's goal and solution to our neighboring states that have also been in land conflict with Cross River State.
i. build a robust inter-state land-truce partnership with the states commissions to make available boundary documents.
ii. replicate our office in the local government areas, further spreading our vision.

With Solve's support, we will put the team of 5 staff and 3 volunteers on a salary. This will serve as an incentive on the time they have made selfless contribution to the project. We will then make certain monies available for inclusion of expert consultants on further best practices to follow to achieve success in the project.
We will purchase computers, improve our internet bandwidth and move from our one room office space to a two room office space. We will also invest in consumable supplies, travels, telephone and campaigns.

-Funding and Resources: The biggest risk to the planned case is that we might not be able to raise investment capital to support the next phase of development of the blockchain application. As such, we're engaging in more opportunities for funding and giving our best to pitching opportunities.
-Capacity Constraints: We intend to set up a full pilot stage with a case study on Calabar municipality; the most developed local government area of Cross River State.
-Political-Legal Factors: changes in government or government policies and legislation can impact on the activities and outcomes of the foundation's mission.