Proposal for a blockchain based agricultural input voucher system

Abstract Most of the small-scale farmers in Tanzania can’t afford to buy quality agricultural inputs (fertilizers and seeds), therefore the Tanzanian government issues paper-based subsidy vouchers to farmers for buying the inputs at half price. However, challenges like misuse of the vouchers by some...
Ausführliche Beschreibung

Abstract Most of the small-scale farmers in Tanzania can’t afford to buy quality agricultural inputs (fertilizers and seeds), therefore the Tanzanian government issues paper-based subsidy vouchers to farmers for buying the inputs at half price. However, challenges like misuse of the vouchers by some government officials (stealing and favoritism in allocation) and lack of trust (difficulty of verifying vouchers’ authenticity) have resulted into low crop productivity for the farmers and loss of government funds. To address this, we have developed agricultural input voucher system which stores and allocates digital subsidy vouchers to farmers in the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain network whose features like hashing and digital signature prevent misuse and ensure trust of the vouchers. Farmers access the digital vouchers through Short Message Service (SMS) in their mobile phones. Evaluation reveals that, the developed system is effective and meets performance demands of Tanzanian farmers. Also, Raft has better performance than Kafka consensus protocol. Ausführliche Beschreibung