During a live-streamed video conversation between Ethiopia’s Minister for Education and IOHK’s director of African operations, it was confirmed that Ethiopia was working with IOHK, which is the company behind the Cardano blockchain technology in a much-anticipated project to track students’ performance in the African country.
During the video conversation, Ethiopia’s Minister for Education, Getahun Mekuria, said,
“This initiative is about bringing technology to improve the quality of education . . . It’s very practical to think of the blockchain technology [as a way] to improve the quality of education.”
IOHK’s director of African operations, John O’Connor, told Coidesk that the project was still in its initial stages and that the company was currently working on the code that shall run the entire system. According to the director, they do not expect the system to launch until January 2022.
5 million Ethiopian students to receive a Cardano blockchain-based ID once the project is completed
Once the project is completed and the system is up and running, Ethiopian students will be issued with a Cardano blockchain-based student ID to allow the education ministry to track their performance.
Also, approximately 750,000 teachers will be able to access the system.
Cardano system to compliment student tablets to be supplied by China
The current development around Ethiopia’s partnership with Cardano comes after the government contracted Chinese manufacture to manufacture and supply tablet computers to its students.
A little about Cardano blockchain
Cardano was founded by Charles Hoskinson, who was a co-founder of Ethereum blockchain that has transformed blockchain technology through smart contracts (computer programs that run on blockchain networks to oversee the execution of agreements/contracts between two parties in the blockchain network).
Cardano blockchain however got ahead of Ethereum by starting by using the proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism which is much efficient compared to the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism, which is what Ethereum and Bitcoin uses.
Cardano blockchain uses a cryptocurrency denoted as ADA, whose value by the time of writing this post was $1.34 on major cryptocurrency exchanges.
Africa is proving to be a fertile ground for blockchain technology adoption
According to reports from Useful Tulips, Nigeria is among the largest peer-to-peer (P2P) markets for Bitcoin in the world.
There are also reports that Akon, a hip hop star is speculating about building a cryptocurrency-based project in Senegal.
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