Detailed Plan

Expanded Problem Statement

Millions of people pay billions of dollars for housing each year across Africa. However due to the informal nature of both the local affordable housing sector and its customers, those consistently making payments are largely unknown. Despite contributing the largest proportion of their income to reliably pay for housing, not being able to prove this history prevents the majority of Africans from establishing reputations of trust used to gain access to other financial services. The informal nature also creates lack of transparency and data required to codify and legitimise this direct route of housing finance to attract funds from other sources.

A Collaborative Approach

The Affordable Housing Company (Nigeria) and Casa Real (Mozambique) have partnered to help provide a solution to this problem, so that different perspectives from across the continent are taken into consideration. While we are both already delivering innovative solutions to allow more Africans currently excluded from the formal financial system, to access affordable housing through programs like lease-to-own, we would also like our customers (and those of our competitors) to benefit from the trust they establish through reliably paying for their housing.

Why Decentralised?

The unfortunate reality of economies in most African countries, means that long term stability is not certain. So while many landlords, housing or informal financing businesses may already be recording information about their customer’s payment history, getting access to this information months or years into the future may be difficult if the customer moves or there are changes to the business or it ceases to exist. By recording payments on the Cardano blockchain that are associated with a customer’s decentralised identity, the customer retains ownership of this information and can continue to access it in the future, regardless of whether the business they made the payments to is still operating.

Expanded Solution Description

Our proposed identity and payment tracking solution will be broken into two components, as follows:

Customer Facing - Mobile App

Mobile applications are accessible to most Africans and therefore a better option than providing access via a web browser. The following functionality will be implemented for the customer mobile app.

• Customers create a decentralised identifier (DID) through Atala PRISM.
• Customers enter their identity and contact information and submit an application to be considered for access to an affordable house through the lease-to-own program. NOTE: This information is not stored on the blockchain.
• Customers can track the status of their application.
• Successful applicants can access their account information, such as payment history, amount outstanding, etc.

Business Facing - Web App

The following functionality will be implemented for the customer account management application.

• Businesses create a decentralised identifier (DID) through Atala PRISM.
• Businesses review customer applications, submitted via the mobile app.
• Businesses update the status of customer applications after assessing their eligibility.
• Businesses issue a verifiable credential (a decentralised identity artefact) through Atala PRISM to successful applicants, after verifying the customer’s identity using methods specific to their region (e.g. physical identity cards).
• Businesses record payments received by customers, which are written to the blockchain against the customer’s DID and updated in the mobile app.

Future Extensions

As adoption of the capabilities made available through this solution grows, additional features could be introduced to further improve the customer experience. Some examples are:

1. Decentralised identities introduced through trusted housing development partners are able to be used by traditional funding institutions and on emerging decentralised finance platforms, such as Empowa.
2. Customer identities can be verified by other trusted institutions, such as local government agencies. As agencies see adoption for Decentralised Identity solutions, they may be driven to support this through the issuance of verifiable credentials.
3. Evolve from tracking cash payments, to support for making payments using cryptocurrencies, such as ADA.

Application Ownership

This application will be developed as open source source software to allow other similar housing providers across Africa to leverage its capabilities for their customers.

Project Timeframes & Budget

The estimated time to completion for this project is 3 months from Atala PRISM availability. The following budget breakdown is included to support the requested funding amount.

Project Manager - 10 days: $5000

Backend/Blockchain Developer - 20 days: $15,000

Frontend/Mobile Developer - 40 days/week: $20,000

Tester - 5 days: $2,500

Total: $42,500