More and more countries on the African continent are betting on digital to circumvent inflation and debt problems. While Zimbabwe has announced that it is backing its gold with digital assets, the Central African Republic looked into the project of “tokenization” of its natural resources on Tuesday, May 16th, and Wednesday 17th, to issue a digital land title that guarantees ownership. This approach also makes it possible to divide up a high-value asset – such as a mining concession so that more people can invest.
Issuing concessions for several years, making assessments and feasibility reports, until now, before seeing the investments arrive, the procedures were long and costly.
Mamadou Koudjim Touré, founder and director of Ubuntu Group, initiator of such projects in the field, sees tokenization as a great advantage for African countries, “The interest is major for African countries because today we can completely short-circuit all this phenomenon. Even before the exploitation, because the exploitation, sometimes, can cost hundreds of millions or billions before generating precisely these minerals. But use this asset, which is digitized, to raise capital. And that is a radical change with democratization leading to wealth creation and much faster access for governments to financial resources that allow the country’s development.”
“The data that is reported must be validated and accepted by international standards. And so there are a whole number of procedures to put in place in this context, and this is once again where the “blockchain” technology comes in to be able to validate and verify the data that is collected. And that there is a level of trust that is established like the report.” added Mamadou Koudjim Touré.
To attract investors, work on credibility, transparency, and good governance is also necessary, according to sector specialists.