Cardano's Deal with the Ethiopian Ministry of Education - the good, the bad and the ineffective

IOHK, the company behind Cardano made headlines back in April 2021 with the news that it was partnering with the the Ministry of Education in Ethiopia to build a national database on Cardano which would create digital identities for 5 million students and 750 000 teachers, allowing authorities to track their academic performance and future employers to verify their academic credentials.

The problem this initiative solves is that of the proliferation of fake degree certificates in Ethiopia: one recent study found that over 3000 Ethiopian Civil Servants had faked their degree certificates to get their jobs.

The problem starts with the fact that many schools only keep paper records of student achievements, which is hardly a good basis for being able to verify students' track records!

The means whereby Ethiopians get their degree certificates is so opaque that Oxford University doesn't even recognise their credentials - at least that's what John O’Connor, IOHK’s director of African Operations, was told by the college when he enquired as to why there were so few students from Ethiopia at Oxford when he himself was a student there.

By providing students with unique digital identities, presumably from their first year in school and which they then carry with them for the rest of their lives, will make it easy for schools, exam boards and universities to 'attach' genuine certificates to the actual students who have actually studied specific exams and attended those specific institutions.

The idea is for the progress reports/ identities to be updated regularly, so anyone can check to see if there's a legitimate 'tie in' between the courses and exams a student has sat and the certificates they are awarded, all available on one publicly accessible database (although presumably with some kind of privacy layers built in).

How will it work on the ground?

This is the largest blockchain project deal ever signed with a government, and so besides IOHK there's a few other players involved -

• Developers are going to use Atala prism to build the digital identities to be stored on the Cardano Blockchain.

• The Ethiopian government is apparently going to run a full Cardano node, although this won't be necessary for access to the educational data.

• The Ethiopian government has apparently signed a deal with a Chinese company to provide enough tablets so that 3500 schools in Ethiopia can get online and actually use this solution.

• Some aid money will also go towards funding this project.

One interesting idea for making this work in the often disconnected regions of rural Ethiopia is the give students digital identity cards, chipped so they don't necessarily have to be online to be able to prove their credentials to an employer.

Early on in this video there's an interview with the Ethiopian education minster.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRjj662kJsk

He's pretty well placed to front this - having been the tech minister before this, although NB he does mention the word 'blockchain' about 50 times in the video, and I think there's a correlation between the number of times someone uses that word and their actual understanding of it.

This is a decent article from The Conversation summarising what they know about the project so far.

What are the supposed benefits?

This is a great example of Ethiopia trying to leapfrog from a pre-industrial education system to a Web 3.0 system, and when the tech is available and accessible with a relatively small investment, this seems to make sense.

In theory sorting out the corruption in certification should help sift the most able candidates into the most appropriate jobs, and give the very best students more of a chance to get into universities abroad as their qualifications will have more credibility.

I guess the immutable nature of blockchain means this is a hack-proof solution to educational record storage. You could falsify today's entries, but if it doesn't fit with yesterday's that would raise questions.

It's a relatively cheap solution to improving one aspect of the education system, and it has knock-on benefits - most obviously that of rolling out tech to a wider range of schools.

And it puts Ethiopia on the map as one of the more innovative developing countries, one of the first to adopt appropriate tech to try and improve its social development.

What it won't solve

While this is a cost-effective means of improving the monitoring of students, it won't solve the underlying poverty issues which retard education in Ethiopia (and other developing countries), so a lot of students might end up with quite poor performance records!

Neither will it solve the problem of 'in-house corruption' - cases of individual students bribing their instructors to give them better grades, although as students switch teachers this might be traceable with a database in place.

Oh, one other problem is the age old one of government and ministerial continuity - if it takes 5 years to role this out, a new government and ministerial set may not be so keen and just axe the project.

Final thoughts: the potential downsides of Blockchain Based Digital Identities

The libertarian in me shudders at this level of government surveillance!

This from the Atala web site already looks a bit dystopian in a 'government surveillance net' sort of way!

I especially wonder about students' right to erase their data if something has been mis-recorded, or just their plain right to NOT have such a record if they're not that academic?

And on that note, I can't help but think this could be great for the more able students with glowing records, but for those who have a proven, immutable track record of failure, this could be used as a method to force them into adult education in later life or limit their access to certain corners of the jobs market.

While this clearly isn't IOHK's intention, this project could end up being very divisive and dystopian.

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