Getting a title and deed registered for any piece of land in Africa is a thorny affair.

The processes are painfully slow and ladened with corruption. Cases of double ownership are many and land disputes clog the justice system from Cape Town to Cairo.

It is no wonder most of the land in sub-Saharan African nations is unregistered and still held under old customary rights that are difficult to navigate in a modern commercial world.

A number of startups have taken up the opportunity to disrupt land registration in Africa by introducing blockchain – a ledger system for recording digital transactions – in land registries across the continent.

One of the pioneers in this is Land Layby Group. A real estate firm with a tech arm, Land Layby operates across five countries, developing land and selling lots to Africans living in the diaspora.  The company is planning to launch its first digital registry in Kenya.

Landby’s platform will be supported by Harambee tokens, a cryptocurrency that facilitates land option contracts. These contracts have been validated by Land LayBy Kenya Ltd since 2014 and allow local residents to start the land ownership journey without the need for bank loans, paving way to the unbanked community, according to Medium.

Moguldom talked to Dr. Peter Tole, head of Land Layby Group, about their initiative and what it means for landowners in Africa.

Moguldom: I understand you already operated in Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea. Are there any other countries?

Dr. Peter Tole: There are many other countries lined up. You never know how long it takes to navigate the red tape, like Ghana has taken us a while dealing with registration, to get partners. So it takes a while but we do have plans to introduce the service in most other countries.

Moguldom: How does your platform work?

Dr. Peter Tole: What is happening with our platform is that we have landowners registering their titles with our platform and then our platform will have anonymous advocates who will authorize those titles. The process of authentication of those titles is going to be managed by consensus protocol such that at any one time, all the actors who are advocates should be able to agree with whatever has been posted onto the blockchain. So what that means is if Mary says that block A is hers and Jane says ‘No, block A is mine’, it will be up to the advocates to come up with a consensus. If 99 out of 100 come up with consensus that block A is Mary’s and not Jane’s, then that’s the single proof that we will go with.

Moguldom: Will you be relying on data from national land registries in Kenya?

Dr. Peter Tole: So we have to abide by the constitution of Kenya. The constitution of Kenya  recognizes land registry as the only legal registry. We cannot start a legal separate registry. So basically, we are going to mirror this function oathed to the government registry. But having said that, we know very well the challenges that the government registry is facing. We know where the weak point are, we know where the representation occurs. Sometimes, it’s just the interface — the officer who is handling the card relaying incorrect information. Basically, we cannot come up with our own registry at the moment. The best we can do is to create a mirror reflection. Now, the beauty of creating a mirror reflection means that our records will be available online to everyone and the records are immutable.

Moguldom: How will your registry help undocumented landowners and protect them from land grabbers?

Dr. Peter Tole: Our platform will have several actors. One of the actors is advocates. At some later stage, we will introduce some government officials, financial agents, financial institutions as well. For instance, if any land has not been registered then we will mandate some trusted officials who are accessing the platform to interact with the chiefs or the Dos. These are advocates who have heavily invested in our system, advocates who have some sizeable chunk of stake in our system, someone we trust and someone who can’t corrupt the system because they have so much to lose if they do. So then these are the people who will then go interview the chiefs, interview the elders and then come up with a registry that we can post to the blockchain. But then again, someone else has to do the same thing so that there is consensus, so it’s not only one person doing it but it will be several and we will make sure they are incentivized to do that.

Moguldom: How will you pay these advocates?

Dr. Peter Tole: The way we will incentify them to go out there and collect data is to make sure they are rewarded. For instance, the first person to solve the problem of notarizing this document may be rewarded with 100 Harambee tokens and the second one to do that may be given 90 Harambee tokens, the third one 50, and the fourth one, maybe 45. So it’s going to be many people who will be wanting to solve because it will be a problem to solve. We don’t know who this land belongs to so an advocate will be running out to make sure they come up with a solution to that particular problem. We will be listing lands that don’t have titles and we will make sure that we interact with the government so that it can probably issue titles at a later stage or even integrate our system into their own registries.  The most important thing I want you to understand is that this is a private blockchain, yet it is public. So it is land registry for private landowners or private institutions who want to register their land with us. We are not forcing the government to do it, because we also sell land.

Moguldom: Who will be buying this land?

Dr. Peter Tole: We develop land. We buy huge chunks of land, subdivide the land into several blocks of land and then we offer them to sale to Kenyans in the diaspora. So we will also be doing the same thing to our blocks of land and we are extending the software to any other private landowner, land seller or land company who wants to use our system to post their block of land to the Blockchain.

Moguldom: What makes your blockchain registry different?

Dr. Peter Tole: Blockchain creates automated trust. We have talked about the incentives that the advocates have in making sure that the titles that have been posted to the platform are notarized and they are accurate, such that if you are a land seller and you want to sell land to Kenyans in the diaspora, they really don’t need to know about you. All they need to know is that your land is posted to Land LayBy blockchain and they will buy it immediately. It helps land sellers sell, dispose of their land immediately. It kind of creates land liquidity because if you want to sell, you probably will be able to sell as soon as you want to. The No. 1 reason why people don’t buy land is because they don’t want to lose money. They don’t trust the land seller. It’s a good solution to land sellers.

Moguldom: You have yet to launch the product. What challenges do you expect?

Dr. Peter Tole: One of the challenges that we expect is that this is new technology. Not just in Africa but also all over the world, probably just about 5 percent (of people) understand what Blockchain technology is. Most people think blockchain is synonymous with Bitcoin and you know Bitcoin has net failure roots. It was used by drug dealers. It was used by people who were trying to conceal their identity. People may not really understand the benefits of blockchain because they may associate it with criminal activity. That is the first challenge that we expect to contend with. Central Bank has come out opposing cryptocurrencies. Our platform will be supported by Harambee token, which is a cryptocurrency.

We expect some friction with the authorities because they may not really accept the functionalities of the token. Thirdly, we are experiencing issues with blockchain technology because it’s so young and scalability is an issue. How do you scale without affecting the transaction time frame? You want to make a transaction in a second, two seconds, you don’t want to delay for 10 days. So how do we do that? Fourthly, interoperability. How can our platform link, interact with other platforms? How easy is it?

Moguldom: What solution do you have for these challenges?

Dr. Peter Tole: We have solutions that we plan to implement. For instance, the app technology that can run the blockchain technology through the sim-card express solution — if it’s possible to do that. So those are solutions that we will think about once we start running, but the most important challenge will be the stigmatization.