BETALCADB is in public beta — v0.1.0Public beta
LCADB Manifesto · v0.1.0

An African LCA database,
open and sovereign

LCADB is the first component of OCKA. It collaboratively documents the emission factors of African industries, adapted to the continent's real processes.

Why LCADB

Existing databases do not describe Africa

Dominant LCA databases — Ecoinvent, GaBi, and their peers — are designed from Europe and North America. They describe those regions' industries, soils, energy mixes and agricultural practices.

For Africa, two options today: use these data as a proxy (scientifically inaccurate), or pay expensive licences for bases that do not describe the continent.

LCADB fills that gap. Data is drawn from primary African sources: PSD MTEDD, OCP reports, scientific publications, academic theses, field measurements.

Principles

Five founding principles

Primary African sources
Built from African scientific publications, institutional reports, academic theses and field data. No data redistributed from proprietary European databases.
Distributed governance
Contributors validate collectively through a workflow inspired by open source. Sectoral maintainers are elected by the community. No central authority.
Full openness
All published data is released under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0: freely consultable, reusable with attribution, enrichable by all.
Cryptographic traceability
Every published datum carries an immutable SHA-256 signature. Public change history. Verifiable at any time.
Documented meritocracy
Contributor status is earned through validated contributions. Maintainer status is earned through election. All decisions are public and justified.
Workflow

How a datum becomes LCADB

Every contribution follows a transparent workflow: submission, auto-review, public community review, decision by an elected sectoral maintainer, final publication with cryptographic signature.

01
Submission
Proposal with verifiable documentary sources
02
Auto check
Consistency, sources, duplicates verified automatically
03
Public review
14 to 30 days of open community examination
04
Decision
Elected sectoral maintainer rules with justification
05
Publication
Immutable SHA-256 signature, CC-BY-SA 4.0 licence
Governance

Who decides what

LCADB is operated by Konfluance SARL, a Moroccan ClimaTech company based in Rabat. The technical infrastructure is borne by Konfluance.

Scientific ownership belongs to the community. Each published datum is attributed to its contributors. Editorial decisions are made collectively by elected sectoral maintainers.

A datum under VERIFIED status is immutable: its cryptographic signature guarantees integrity, its change history is public, its reuse is governed by the CC-BY-SA 4.0 licence.

Contribute

Enrich the knowledge commons

During the beta phase, contributions are made in direct liaison with Konfluance. The public contribution workflow will open in the coming weeks.