Community Driven Development. Our local partner, Malebi, is women's association focusing on sustainable charcoal production. They hold a government-issued title to help restore the highly degraded Ahua Classified Forest in Ivory Coast. Malebi employs agro-forestry techniques to produce climate-positive charcoal resulting in a net increase in forest cover. Furthermore, Malebi's charcoal business benefits an estimated 200 local families through job creation and Malebi sponsored community development programmes. Charcoal production is one of the largest drivers of deforestation in Ivory Coast and demand is driven partially by the EU market - Ivory Coast exported over 3 thousand tons of charcoal primarily to the EU in 2017 according to FAO statistics. Malebi's mission is to convert the harmful charcoal industry into a driver of environmental restoration and community development. Gaiachain aims to help Malebi achieve this goal with blockchain technologies.

Malebi is managed by 14 women from rural villages around the classified forest. Malebi benefits an estimated 200 families living in or near the project area. So in the short term, the project will help bring positive impact to 200 rural families in Ivory Coast.

The overall problem the project will help solve is illegal and unsustainable charcoal production. The more specific problems are Malebi's inability to: 1) differentiate its charcoal from illegal and unsustainable charcoal; 2) maximize supply chain efficiency; and 3) prove climate-positive production. Regarding production differentiation, while the demand for 'green' charcoal on the domestic market is minimal, this is expected to change in the next 3-5 years due to the EU's Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) currently being negotiated in Ivory Coast. The VPA will help give sustainable charcoal suppliers a market edge, but only if they can prove provenance, legality and sustainability. This project will prepare Malebi for VPA implementation. The project will also help Malebi attract EU buyers seeking sustainable charcoal thus opening up new market opportunities. Regarding supply chain inefficiencies, Malebi currently has no system to monitor their supply chain from the forest to the market. Based on preliminary monitoring, Malebi suspects that their legal charcoal is being mixed with illegal charcoal by transporters and traders to avoid paying bribes to authorities at checkpoints. Regarding climate positive production, Malebi would eventually like to take advantage the voluntary carbon market payments but in order to do so, they need to be able to demonstrate land use and forest cover change. The project will allow Malebi to use an existing free land cover change tool (Global Forest Watch) and establish a monitoring framework to demonstrate sustainability.

Gaiachain will work with Malebi to develop a charcoal tracking tool built on Hyperledger Sawtooth. The tool will include information on provenance, legality and sustainability. By employing blockchain, rather than a centralized database, we'll help Malebi lower risk of fraud in their supply chain thus increasing their chances of accessing both EU charcoal markets and voluntary carbon markets. Currently, the main source of fraud is the mixing of Malebi with non-Malebi charcoal by transporters and traders. The system will help prevent this by storing information on the weight and real-time location of charcoal sacks on the distributed ledger. To help lower risk and make buyers feel secure in their purchase of sustainable charcoal, the system will establish a chain of custody from the tree to the market. Once a tree is harvested, a geo-tagged photo will transmit cryptographically secure location information directly to the blockchain. Through QR codes scanned via a mobile app, a user will be able to trace the exact location of each tree that makes up the bag of charcoal. Blockchain is also important for proving legality. Legality documents will be stored on the distributed ledger so users can be confident that the documents have not been tampered with since they were uploaded. Users will also be able to access the entire legality history of Malebi as documents will be permanently stored on the ledger. Worth mentioning is that we acknowledge the limitations of blockchain technology in reducing fraud in commodity tracking. This is why Gaiachain is developing a Blockchain+ approach that combines blockchain with principles of independent forest monitoring to help ensure that information entering the blockchain is correct. We'll work with Malebi to establish a monitoring system to help ensure data integrity. In the longer term, we aim to help Malebi to establish low-cost blockchain-based money-transfer system when they secure overseas buyers to minimize transaction costs. We would also like to explore ways to support Malebi is securing loans/grants through a blockchain based system such as Moeda. Guidance from B4H on these aspects would be much appreciated.