Is Blockchain technology the key to unlock Africa’s digital gridlock?

President Samia Suluhu Hassan of Tanzania has sparked a serious debate online on blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. The Citizen quotes her as “saying the age of crypto and blockchain was dawning….” In his response to this ongoing discussion among Tanzanians on Twitter and Clubhouse, the tech savvy Given Edward wrote: “I’m all for blockchain as a technology. Bitcoin, not so much.”

To contribute to this timely conversation, this article seeks to explore how blockchain technology could also be used broadly to address challenges associated with digitalization and archiving in Africa. It does so by providing an overview of what the technology is, detailing its practicality by looking at implementations around the world, and assessing the likelihood of the technology being adopted fully by African countries.

The Digital Challenge

Since the turn of the century, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have arguably been increasing at astronomical rates with new forms of technologies being discovered on a much more frequent basis. As a result, archiving practices have continuously shifted towards digital archiving, especially with the emergence of technologies such as Optical Character Readers (OCR) software that makes it quick and easy to convert analogue texts to a digital format. However, this shift has come with its fair share of challenges. There have been lingering questions about the legitimacy and neutrality of the management of digital archives.

As more and more documents are being digitized, questions have arisen as to how archives can be controlled, both as part of a legacy and as a record of the tools of government. These key concerns have perhaps slowed down the full embrace of digital archiving. On the whole, there is an underlying belief amongst traditional archivists that the authenticity of the existing archives will be lost in an increasingly ‘dematerialized’ world.

Nevertheless, all is not lost. The emergence of ‘disruptive’ and ‘transformative’ technologies such as blockchain could breathe new life into digital archiving. Current technology trends show that it is inevitable that the future of archiving lies in the digital world. As a result, there is a growing need to integrate physical archives into digital formats while still preserving the original content and credibility.

But what is Blockchain?

Blockchain is a distributed (ledger) technology that has the potential to address issues of authenticity and reliability of digital archives. As a sequence of blocks, blockchain holds a complete list of transaction records like a conventional public ledger. Such ledgers are secure, immutable, and are distributed in a decentralized manner across computing devices – otherwise called nodes – that are part of the blockchain infrastructure. Blockchain technology can be simply understood as a book that has a series of pages and each page contains a reference i.e. page number as well as information about that page.

Similarly, in a blockchain, each block has contents of the block, a reference to the previous block, and a unique hash code that is important for ordering. It is crucial, however, to note that blockchain technology is meant to be used in tandem with existing digital platforms as a form of credibility measure rather than a standalone technology. The origin of this revolutionary technology is mysterious and is attributed to a pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto whose real identity is presumably yet to be discovered.

The standout features of blockchain technology are perhaps what has made it such an attractive and disruptive technology – decentralization, persistency, anonymity, and auditability. Blockchain eliminates the need for a third-party intermediary service, makes it impossible for transactions to be deleted or rolled back, maintains privacy of the users, and makes for easy tracking and verification of transactions. These features have been leveraged in different industries including health, digital currency, voting systems, and land records.

Blockchain technology has been extensively used in the fast-emerging digital currencies (cryptocurrencies) such as Bitcoin and Dogecoin. However, since its invention, it has been linked with criminal cyber activity. It might therefore seem ironic that the underlying technology could offer the basis of trustworthy record-keeping!

Blockchain Technology in Action

While, generally, not a lot of research has been done to specifically address how blockchain technology could be used in archiving, relatively, a lot more work has been done in health records management as well as in land registry. For instance, in November 2015, the Financial Times reported that the government of Honduras had approached Factom, a Texas-based start-up, about the use of blockchain technology to address the record keeping problems associated with the Honduran land registration system. For recording transactions on land, Factom used a network of nodes for various roles. These roles included acceptance, verification, and updating of land registry information.

A key design aspect of the blockchain was that no node was ever fully in charge of any given role thus making the blockchain less vulnerable to manipulation and attack. Factom’s blockchain system was tailored to prove authenticity of the landowners and land registration. A unique hash code (identifier) would be generated once a document was uploaded to a node and the hash code would be subsequently regenerated and updated whenever a change was made.

Records were preserved in two places – the federated and audit nodes. Both needed to provide corresponding hash codes to prove validity of the documents. This blockchain design ensured that it was virtually impossible to present fake land registration documents.

In the case of the healthcare industry, blockchain technology has been introduced to provide a decentralized system to store patients’ health records, which in turn lessens the danger of data leaks and eases access to health records by practitioners and patients. On the blockchain network, health records are saved using their public keys and transactions containing a patient’s health records are saved with their unique IDs (hash codes). Healthcare organizations can access the patient’s data only when the unique IDs and public key match.

By looking at the implementation in these fields of land and health, it is  possible to get a fairly accurate picture of what digital archiving would look like when implemented and scaled-up with blockchain technology. One of the major issues with digital archiving is ensuring authenticity and integrity of the archives once its digital format is uploaded to the internet. Authenticity of an archive is reliant on establishing and preserving the identity and integrity of an archive from its point of creation and thereafter.

Blockchain technology offers archivists the possibility of preserving the integrity of such digital archives. Important details such as date of creation, electronic signatures, and authors could be stored in the blockchain. Subsequently such details can be updated if they are changed in the future.

In order to deal with the issue of manipulation of digital archives, blockchain technology uses hashes in the metadata of a file which changes if there is any alteration in a digital file. By comparing the hash code from the current file to the original one, it is possible to determine whether a file has been tampered with.

Blockchain technology can also be applied to web archiving to preserve content integrity. Identifying data (hashcodes, date of creation, author) can be stored in a blockchain that is embedded on the website such that when a user retrieves web content, they get a confirmation of the content integrity through verification of the identifying data. This information can be used by entities as proof against legal disputes.

Chained to Blockchain?

Awareness of any given technology promotes its adoption and implementation. A recent study that sought to find out the awareness of blockchain technology in Botswana and Zimbabwe, for instance, revealed that amongst archiving practitioners, 70.4% knew about this technology with the majority getting information from the internet and from fellow professionals. Amongst those aware of the technology, 73.17% said that managing archives in blockchain increases authenticity and reliability of archives. The study revealed that there is a willingness to embrace blockchain technology, but infrastructural and financial constraints remain an issue in developing nations.

In the current context, records and archives are vital in driving openness, good governance, transparency, and accountability, which has always been an issue in many African countries. The archivist’s role should be to collect, preserve, and make available archives that document the voices of community or civil society groups. Clearly the internet offers the ‘perfect’ platform for widespread dissemination of information digitally. Sticking to the limited traditional archiving will only serve to suppress these voices.

Dysfunctional archiving undermines the ability of government to make informed decisions and policies and is a hindrance to information access and use. Digital archives could present a viable opportunity to provide transparent and accountable records for decision makers. Probing questions have to be directed to archivists in the African continent who have been slow to embrace digital archiving let alone blockchain technology.

The rest of the globe has made significant strides in embracing digital archiving, but generally African countries remain firmly entrenched in traditional archiving. As technology continues to evolve at a rapid rate, there’s no reason why archiving practices shouldn’t. It will only serve a greater purpose in the long run.

So how Reliable is Blockchain?

So, is blockchain technology the answer to the management of digital archives? Well, the answer is mixed. While the capabilities and potential of blockchain are well known, it has its fair share of challenges. The decentralized nature of this technology has always fielded questions such as who truly controls the blockchain network.  A major concern that comes with its implementation is that there is always the possibility that the concentration of blockchain nodes with their combined computing power might allow for collusion among nodes and erode the basis of trust upon which the blockchain is built.

While blockchain goes a long way to guarantee authenticity, it does very little to guarantee reliability. Blockchain is susceptible to attacks of colluding selfish miners. Research has shown that the network is vulnerable when one node passes information to another node. During this transfer, there exists a possibility that an attacker can secretly intercept and possibly alter the communication between two nodes.

Nevertheless, bitcoin technology can preserve a certain amount of privacy through the public key and private key. Users are able to transact with both keys without any real identity exposure. However, some studies have shown that blockchain cannot guarantee transactional privacy since the record of transactions are publicly visible. These records can be linked to reveal the user’s information putting their privacy at risk.

Africa’s Digital Turn

Blockchain technology is certainly not the holy grail of digital archiving especially given the key concerns addressed in this article. However, it is a step in the right direction and a nudge towards embracing digital archiving. African countries remain at the tail end of adopting new and emerging technologies. This doesn’t bode well with the continent’s quest to preserve its rich and diverse history, of which archiving is a huge part.

While digital archiving is inevitable, a lot more research needs to go towards making it much more attractive and reliable for archivists and blockchain is a step closer towards achieving that. The sooner African countries embrace efficient and reliable digital archiving, the better it will be for future generations. Stalling would only mean that records are lost, and this will have a lasting impact on Africa’s posterity.