The IOTA Foundation has worked with a Kenyan company to facilitate paperless trade in the region, and following a successful pilot, the concept is being expanded to other trade lanes.
The Foundation is partnering with the IOTA Tangle to eliminate the inefficient paper-based processes that plague commerce and migrate all relevant data to the IOTA Tangle.
The IOTA Foundation has announced that the first phase of its relationship with an East African enterprise to enable paperless trading in the region has been completed successfully. The Foundation partnered with Trademark East Africa on the project, which aimed to modernize the region’s supply chain’s inefficient and costly paper-based operations. This technique was replaced by a more efficient digital approach based on IOTA’s ledger data structure, the Tangle.
The Foundation teamed up with the Nairobi, Kenya-based firm to build an interconnectivity technology infrastructure that will allow East African entities to “communicate in a transparent, secure, and instantaneous manner, both among themselves and with international partners.”
Trademark East Africa (TMEA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting regional commercial growth. According to its estimations, a single transaction in Africa necessitates the completion of 96 paper papers on average. The situation is significantly worse for exporters. They lose documents because they have to exchange them manually, which leads to delays, which are nearly always costly.
Together with TMEA, the IOTA Foundation is working to change this.
IOTA – Changing trade and people’s lives
The Trade Logistics Information Pipeline (TLIP), which focused on the Kenyan flower business, was their initial endeavor. This is one of Kenya’s most important industries, as well as one of Africa’s largest. Kenya exports over 180,000 tonnes of flowers each year, or nearly seven million stems every day. Because this type of product is particularly perishable, having an optimized and efficient supply chain is crucial.
This is something that TLIP has been offering to farmers and exporters.
“In the pilot, the IOTA Foundation and TMEA effectively mapped the export process of Kenyan flower producers, built improved user journeys, and collaborated with technical teams within border agencies,” according to a news statement shared with CNF.
Moving the data to the IOTA Tangle was critical for a number of reasons, including a significant reduction in monetary costs and the ability to conduct transactions quickly. The participants were also reducing the chances of documentation being misplaced or incorrect.
TLIP brought together a varied group of partners who were all working together to “create coordinated operational frameworks that streamline paperless trade processes.” It involved not just the producers and logistical businesses, but also the regulators, who were the only ones who could issue certifications for the items. Among the most essential collaborators were the Kenya Revenue Authority and the Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Services.
The IOTA Foundation and TMEA intend to expand their trade lanes following the success of TLIP. These include tea exports to the United Kingdom, fish exports to Belgium, and textile exports to the United States. The two partners are also collaborating with East African governments to deploy the system with border authorities, giving people in the region new opportunities.
Jens Munch Lund-Nielsen, the IOTA Foundation’s head of global trade and supply chains, said, “The technology we deploy, with the permissionless distributed ledger, is about building confidence to all of these parties at the crucial point where they exchange data.” Cross-border trade costs have a huge impact on the cost of goods, which has an impact on employment and consumer markets.
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Tangle of IOTA/n
