Because of its transparency, blockchain can be a valuable tool in the fight against corruption and waste of resources in human activities. At least that is the opinion of Matthew Van Niekerk, CEO of SettleMint.
The cure for lack of transparency
On Monday, July 5, Matthew Van Niekerk published an article on the World Economic Forum website in which he advocates for the democratization of blockchain to strengthen democracies around the world.
To illustrate his point, Van Niekerk takes the example of public procurement. As a reminder, these are processes by which governments acquire goods, services or works. However, all these processes are cruelly lacking in transparency. Indeed, the OECD estimates that up to 10-30% of investments via public funds can be lost to corruption.
“Blockchain has the potential to protect against these weaknesses at almost every stage of the procurement process.”
Matthew Van Niekerk
With more transparency, oversight bodies, end users, media and citizens would therefore have the ability to monitor all of these public procurements and detect corruption attempts if they occur.
In the rest of his article, Van Niekerk points to the inefficiency of land titling services. According to him, this inefficiency in land titling systems is a major source of corruption.
“The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s 2019 report on land registry corruption in Bangladesh found that obtaining a deed writer’s license results in bribes being paid to the highest ranking administrators.”
Matthew Van Niekerk
Obviously, all of these issues could be solved by blockchain, if the solution was based on open blockchains, such as Bitcoin (BTC) or Ethereum (ETH). Unfortunately, the companies behind this type of system too often choose the private blockchain.
