Cardano launches blockchain deployment in Ethiopia with 5M students and teachers

The Cryptocurrency platform, Cardano, has announced that it is partnering with the Government of Ethiopia to implement a national, blockchain-based student and teacher ID and attainment recording system. The system is to help verify the grades of students through digital means and also monitor their school performance.

This will be delivered through an identity solution called Atala PRISM, built on Cardano. It will enable authorities to create records of educational performance across 3,500 schools, 5 million students, and 750,000 teachers to detect the locations and causes of educational under-achievement and allocate educational resources effectively shares John O’Connor – African Operations Director IOHK.

In addition, it will provide the students with blockchain-verified digital qualifications with the aim to reduce fake university and job applications. This will also increase social mobility by allowing employers to verify the grades of job applicants without third-party agencies.

TAMPER-PROOF DATA MANAGEMENT

The blockchain-based national identity system is an integral part of Digital Ethiopia 2025 which is the country’s Digital Transformation strategy. The Ethiopian government recently issued a national identity standard and the Atala PRISM blockchain ID will be the first system to issue IDs based on this standard.

The strategy seeks to drive digital transformation in the country in sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, and tourism. The Ethiopian government will also be examining the wider adoption of our Atala products, which include the PRISM platform, for everything from blockchain-based ‘track-and-trace of smallholder agricultural supply chains to digital IDs for transport or healthcare. We are already in discussions around the use of blockchain-based digital identity for two other multi-million user applications.

EDUCATIONAL ENDEAVOR

With Cardano individual grades, behaviour, attendance, and educational attainment across all kindergartens, elementary schools, and general secondary schools will be monitored successfully. Teachers will also use the system to manage schedules or transfers and also give reports of students’ behaviours or dropouts. The project will expand to universities where degrees will also be digitally verified on the Cardano blockchain, allowing employers to easily validate the authenticity of applicants’ educational credentials.

The Ethiopian government is providing five million teachers and students with tablets and a dedicated internet network, giving all students instant access to their academic records. This will open up higher education and employment opportunities for 80 per cent of the country’s population living in rural regions. Student IDs will be paired with data from Learning Management Systems and harnessed by machine learning algorithms to drive personalized tuition, a dynamic curriculum, and data-driven policies and funding.

Cardano has long recognized that developing countries could uniquely benefit from blockchain technology because of their lack of embedded, legacy digital systems and the fact that blockchains are lower cost than cumbersome infrastructure. Hence, we IOHK and Cardano are already working with other governments on using blockchain to digitize public services, including a project with Georgia’s Ministry of Education pioneering the use of its Atala products to underpin a blockchain-based system for verifying graduate degrees. In 2019, IOHK also ran a pioneering all-female software development training program focusing on blockchain solutions.

The partnership announcement with the Ethiopian government is a ground-breaking first step in Cardano’s mission to help drive decentralized digital transformation in Africa. Join the #CardanoAfrica show on the 29th of April to find out more.