The Foundation is partnering with Trademark East Africa to develop digital infrastructure for improving supply chain transparency and trust among trading partners in Kenya.

The IOTA Foundation, the non-profit foundation driving open-source distributed ledger technology for a new digital economy, today announced the initial success of its ongoing collaboration with Trademark East Africa (TMA).

The duo aims to build a decentralized digital infrastructure for optimized trade exports using IOTA’s distributed technology to phase out paperwork from crucial supply chains.

As per the release, IOTA Foundation and Trademark East Africa will work on creating a system for East African businesses and government systems to communicate in a transparent, secure, and instantaneous manner, both amongst themselves as well as with international partners.

This would further enable traders to focus on developing their product and optimizing their business by digitizing bureaucratic processes and moving export documentation to the Tangle, IOTA’s ledger data structure.

The problem and the IOTA solution

According to Trademark East Africa’s estimates, an African entrepreneur is liable to fill out an average of 96 paper documents for a single transaction.

However, the system developed by the IOTA Foundation and TMA anchors the key trade documents on the Tangle and shares them with customs in destination countries to speed up the export process and make African companies more competitive globally.

“The technology we use, with the permissionless distributed ledger, is about bringing trust to all these actors at the vital point when they exchange the data. The cost of doing cross-border trade has an enormous effect on the cost of goods, which in turn affects the employment and consumer markets,” said Jens Munch Lund-Nielsen, Head of Global Trade & Supply Chains, IOTA Foundation, in a statement.

TradeMark Africa has made the project a strategic priority and extended its contract with the IOTA Foundation. As such, IOTA will engage governments around the world to take advantage of this innovation with the aim of making cross-border trade inclusive and easy for all.

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of TradeMark Africa.