After months of teasing on social media which in turn lead to mass speculation, Cardano developer, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) finally announced a partnership with the Ethiopian government aimed at digitizing the country’s education sector. This was expected to be announced on the 29th of April at the Cardano Africa Conference but they decided to break the news early instead.
IOHK’s director for African operations John O’Connor said in a blog post that the blockchain firm will deploy its decentralized identity solution Atala PRISM to thousands of schools in Africa’s second-most populous country.
This has the potential to do wonders for Ethiopia as the identity solution which is built on Cardano will be used to do stuff like digitally verify grades, remotely monitor school performance and boost education and employment across Ethiopia.
“This will provide all students with blockchain-verified digital qualifications to reduce fraudulent university and job applications, and increase social mobility by allowing employers to verify all applicants’ grades without third-party agencies.”
This unprecedented partnership between IOHK and the Ethiopian government will first seek to benefit over 3,500 schools which makes up for 5 million students and 750,000 teachers. This is all part of Ethiopia’s transformation strategy.
Earlier this month, the CEO of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson used his youtube account to let his followers know about developments being made in Africa.
“We’re also on the commercial side really scaling up our commercial division and in Africa in particular we’re definitely going to scale up resources there into the eight figures because there’s a lot of good news coming.”
