United Nations to utilize Blockchain for land registry in Afghanistan

In September 2019, OICT and UN-Habitat signed a Memorandum of Understanding to provide a framework of cooperation for the development of a digital land registry using emerging technology tools in support of the Government of Afghanistan’s City for All programme. The two UN entities later collaborated with the LTO Network to leverage blockchain technology to support the survey, registration and documentation of properties in Afghan municipalities. The collaboration was undertaken under the Kabul Strengthening Municipal Nahias Programme (KSMNP) funded by USAID.

Victor Kisob, Deputy Executive Director, UN-Habitat: “Land is central to ending poverty and inequality, to enhance access to food security, to provide basic services, to foster peace and stability, and to reduce land degradation in rural and urban areas. UN-Habitat is supporting member states to build and strengthen systems to fast track progress towards Sustainable Development Goals 1, 5 and 11, and to generate data for monitoring progress, reporting, as well as for effective and evidence-based policy formulation and decision making. Efficient and accessible land registries are key for this process. The collaboration between UN-Habitat, OICT and LTO will promote the use of modern technology and an integrated approach to data generation for this purpose.”

Maurizio Gazzola, Chief Strategic Solutions, OICT: “OICT has collaborated with UN-Habitat, the Government of Afghanistan and the LTO Network to build a software solution that can effectively support Afghanistan’s digitization of government administration services to improve the quality of life for its citizens. The plug-and -play design of the LTO Network’s blockchain and the contribution of transaction tokens for the Afghanistan project enabled the development of the blockchain anchoring mechanisms and the Open Source certificate of ownership verification tool that is now available to any country to utilize as a blockchain add-on to their existing land registry systems.”

Rick Schmitz, CEO, LTO Network: “We’re proud to facilitate land registry operations for countries around the world through the open source boiler plate that we intensively developed for the past year in collaboration with UN-Habitat and OICT teams. We believe the future for land registries lies with hybrid blockchain solutions that allow for optimized and decentralized data exchange between stakeholders in the land registry process without the need for expensive IT-overhauls, simply by linking Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). By using Live Contracts, data can be automatically distributed to different stakeholders and systems to facilitate land-registry transfers, tax automations, provision of credit, etc, making them unprecedentedly efficient.”