Blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger for recording the history of transactions. It fosters a new generation of transactional applications that establish trust, accountability and transparency. While Bitcoin was the first use case of blockchain, its applications go far beyond the realm of cryptocurrencies.
Blockchain can optimise the way people and organisations interact thanks to a common timeline and a decentralised distributed consensus. Thus it reduces costs and risks associated with the fact of having as much different books records as nodes in a network. The benefits arising from that new paradigm constitute an opportunity for businesses to better serve their clients and achieve value innovation as well as an opportunity for regulatory authorities to better monitore businesses activities and compel organisations to a systematic legal compliance. Among all the possible fields of applications of blockchain technology, supply chain is arguably a particularly interesting use case.
In a supply chain, raw materials follow a predetermined path or set of possible paths. They undergo different processes or different steps through different locations and participants in a sequential and predictible manner until the semi-finished or finished goods are produced. This generates a lot of interactions and scattered records in the books of participants which can lead to errors and manipulations, yielding in turn cost and time consuming reconciliation procedures, legal claims and dispute resolutions.
Provided each flow from a step to another or from a participant to another can be basically thought of as a transaction, using blockchain in supply chains brings lots of benefits to all participants from end to end in terms of visibility, optimisation and forecasting. This is further explained in this whitepaper from IBM: https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?htmlfid=GBE03771USEN.
Thefore, all participants are incentivised to play by the rules of the game and to abide by law provided regulatory authorities might have access to the business blockchain that records their activities. Thus any irregularity can be spotted. In particular, the conditions under which raw materials are extracted and produced can be assessed and red signals can be detected without ambiguity. In third world countries where forced child labour and human rights are common issues, the social impact of blockchain would therefore be tremendous. One of those country is the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
DRC is the largest country in Africa with 2.5 million km square, 4 times the size of France. It is called the poorest country in the world for some arguably reasons, but having a closer look at its geographical situation it is probably among the richest countries in the world in terms of natural resources.
[List of DRC resources: minerals / hydro power potential / fertile land / population]
But how can a country with that much resources be called the poorest country in the world ?
[Brief history of DRC to understand its current situation]
As a result of Belgium colonisation aftermath, poor leadership and greediness of international corporations, organisations and individuals, DRC has continuously been under pressure and a battle ground because of the incredible wealth of its land.
[Facts to take into account before any solution proposal]
The complexity of illegal and unethical mining in Congo requires more than a generic implementation of a blockchain in supply chain.
[Recap and key takeaways]
