Blockchain for Good

Glad to make your digital acquaintance!

I'm not sure who I am corresponding with but I bet that either way your an enthused Steemit community member who also believes as ardently as I do in more equitable and abundant future thats possible with blockchain.

Like many, I've had a rather bizarre journey into the crypto space. Until 18 months ago, I was working as a medical doctor in a forlorn district hospital in the rural Eastern Cape of South Africa, in what is also known as the former Transkei state. Feeling like I wasn't making an impact on the overwhelming flow of morbidity and mortality, I left my bedside role to lead what amounted to a medical anthropology inquiry into what are some of the socioeconomic determinants of this ill health.

The communities I was serving were seriously impoverished and the HIV/TB epidemic are still raging. This is largely thanks to the regions turbulent political history, in which the apartheid governments of the 1950-1980's essentially placed the region under a sequence of South African military supported dictatorships whom purposely suppressed any economic development in order to generate a male migrant workforce to work in mines around the country. The former Transkei now incorporates close to 10 million hectares and 2.2 million people.

The communities of these lands have been recognized by post apartheid governments as the legal custodians of nearly 4 million hectares of land, however the process for obtaining land tenureship is opaque, corrupt and incredibly lengthy and is held in place by the jurisdiction of the local chiefs who use COMPLETELY haphazard paper based systems for recording land data (See attached). In any case, the former Transkei is an incredibly rich area in many senses such as agricultural capacity, climate, minerals, tourism potential, geopolitical location etc... and if these communities could just have mechanisms to register the billions of dollars worth of land capital, they could in essence financially bootstrap the realization of huge potential for productive economic activities.

There is a massively lucrative race on now between the government and these communities essentially (even though this impoverished communities don't know it yet) to survey this land. The incentive for the government being that if they survey land that hasn't been developed, according to South Africa's underlying dutch roman law, there is no active ownership. However, what this ignores is that the only reason these communities haven't developed this land is because of the century long history of prejudiced economic programs have left them with absolutely no capital to develop the land! In my adopted village of Tsweleni, every single blade of grass, cow, goat and banana tree has a social tenureship attached to it and people are developing these lands but just at a much slower pace that we are used to in the Western World; development often occurs literally brick by brick or pole by pole...in that maybe someone adds a single brick or a pole a week or however much they can buy with their micro-savings. (I'll leave out all the detail of how impossibly hard and dynamically people have to work here to earn those micro-savings).

(Some background information to this.....https://mg.co.za/article/2013-09-05-up-to-21-of-land-is-state-owned-says-surveyor-general)

It was in this context that I founded Africa's Healthiest Village to co-create more inclusive developmental paradigm for the 'dead' land capital of the former Transkei.

Over the course of the last 2 years, through many series of converging and diverging ideas, I have identified 3 key dominant actions areas that in combination could ignite a local economic 'proto-dynamo':

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Creation of a distributed ledger to record land titling and allow for the information frameworks to allow for the key economic functions that drive a market economy (such as credit, sovereign ID creation, insurance, connection to utility grids, banking services, business creation, law enforcement etc....).

--->>>To this end, I have been an early community member with the Bitland project, which is focused on resolving this exact challange.(http://landing.bitland.world/). Bitland has bootstrapped itself into existence through the release of a token called Cadastral which at various times has had a market capitalization of over $10mill USD, with a further more significant token release just announced to develop a number of physical Bitland centers through their feet on the ground network across Africa.

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Opportunities for value creation for individuals

--->>>I been building a local maker-space in our village of Tsweleni to prototype a variety of different "distributive enterprises" (http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Distributive_Enterprise). A Distributive Enterprise is a social enterprise that focuses on open economic development and open collaboration in innovation. In particular, it is a transparent enterprise which maintains the open replication of such an enterprise at the core of its operational strategy.
--->>>Distributive enterprises is a term coined most recently by an open-source hardware group called open source ecology who have essentially expanded on the concept of economic swadeshi proposed by Mahatma Gandhi.
--->>>Here is a link to some footage from the building of our maker-space!:

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--->>>We have already started developing open sourced business models for individuals in these communities to participate in a number of co-operatives. Our most developed model is around participation in a community owned telecommunication co-operative which has been pioneered by a friend of mine.....here is a link to a video which might help visualize all this in real life (

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--->>>We are initiating further distributive enterprises which focus on agriculture, poultry, livestock, tourism and manufacturing which are all based out the maker space which is operating as a collaborative commons for the community.

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Transparent and Equitable mechanisms for distribution of this value creation which give economic incentive for people to participate.

--->>>As my luck would have it, the team @ back feed (http://backfeed.cc/) have been admirably working on just this task in creating a proof-of-value token mechanism for deriving consensus between humans as opposed to computers. I was hoping to create tokens which incorporate the back feed protocol to represent the value sets of each unique community that forms around each enterprise.

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Just felt the need to put all this out there to the Steemit Hive mind for all manner of feedback // potential for collaborations

Our website is @ www.healthiestvillage.org

In the fullness of time,
Pleb