Ethiopia has taken a big leap towards radical digitalization by signing a deal with IOHK on utilizing Atala PRISM and Cardano Blockchain for educational records in the country This deal created a lot of discussion and buzz in the Cardano community as it was one of the largest if not the largest and most remarkable blockchain deal ever made utilizing a truly decentralized blockchain project. This comes as a major step forward as Ethiopia is not highly digitalized and was just recently without a proper internet coverage or access to international banking services.
There is a push for modern technologies and blockchain that makes us all optimistic about the future of Cardano and African countries, especially Ethiopia, on forefront of the adoption. However the real world experience and adaption on the ground is not yet as we all expect it to be, highly functional, futuristic and fair. We know this especially well at Fairway. 50% of our team lives in Ethiopia or at least has an Ethiopian ID. And the rest of us spent a large part of Q3-Q4 of 2021 traveling the beautiful and potential country establishing our business, making market research and building connections and partnerships. Among many important business leaders and government officials we also got a chance to meet the IOHK leadership team who highly encouraged us to seek funding on the Project Catalyst (John O'Connor and Dynal Patel mostly) and later, recently asked us to join PRISM Pioneer Program.
"The Cardano Deal" currently covers Ethiopian high school students and is still on works which means it will take a while before every type of educational record in the country will actually exist on the Blockchain. But it is happening. And it seems the local businesses and operators have no idea of it. And that is not the only part of the recruitment or document handling process that is not digital. In fact there seems to be a great lack of digital services on many fronts in this area. (Please check our attachment on local recruitment methods on a billboard.) Businesses are highly interested in technology and modernization, but still have to rely on traditional manual methods mostly on paper where the document handling is overwhelming and susceptible for fraud. Additionally the in-house recruitments as well as established recruitment consultancy services are crippled by allegations of corruption and nepotism as are some of the major institutions and businesses as well.
The lack of digitalization in the recruitment processes in Ethiopia makes all the developments in the job market slow, ineffective and prone to error. Still, this is a market that needs these these technologies maybe the [most](<https://telegra.ph/Private-and-State-owned-Banks-Combined-Has-Reached-A-Capital-of-1537-Billion-Birr-11-23 >). Ethiopia has 115 million people and the population is very young. The need for new jobs is extensive and every posting for an open position for skilled labor receives hundreds or thousands of applications. And as we have experienced, some businesses might have even thousands of open positions yearly.
When it comes to the current stage of the technological development, internet, hardware and blockchain, this technology will soon be there to achieve higher levels of digitalization. The problem is the lack of tools and processes to provide businesses easy access to these Credentials as part of their ordinary recruitment process. As long as adequate software and tools are not provided to handle recruitment, these businesses will still have to rely on paper based documentation as part of the manual and paper based processes.
Fairway is a startup providing recruitment SaaS to developing markets. Our product is on piloting period and will launch for public in Addis Ababa on Q2 of 2022 and will expand international markets in Africa in 2023. Ethiopia is the first country issuing educational records as VC's on Cardano and Fairway aims to be the first business in the market actually utilizing those records. We are connecting educational records and credentials on Atala PRISM to our recruitment platform and running a pilot to achieve the first ever proven recruitments conducted utilizing these VC's in Ethiopian market. After proposed developments are finished the Ethiopian students holding educational records in Atala PRISM will be able to have their VC's verified in Fairway platform and directly prove their educational records to recruiters using our platform as part of the recruitment process. Job seekers holding educational records on Atala PRISM will have a direct advantage in the job seeking process. This introduction of PRISM and Credentials will directly benefit both parties involved in the recruitment.
Fairway platform currently focuses on recruitment of skilled labor ie. university students and graduates whereas the current focus on Atala PRISM based educational records is on High School Students and graduates. In addition to software development, Fairway also needs to do dedicated customer acquisition and run a pilot project for recruitments focused on high school graduate level recruitments which requires additional work and funding. By building this integration and testing it, Fairway can help internal and international recruiters to easily verify the candidate's VC within the recruitment platform.
This solution will accelerate the real world use of Cardano based DID's. For the Cardano community focused on DID's and for the Ethiopian Ministry of Education utilizing Atala PRISM this proposal highlights the utility of the approach and its attractiveness to foreign businesses. Fairway is verifiably the first foreign business in Ethiopia utilizing this new method of storing and sharing educational records in a large scale which showcases its promise to attract foreign investment among other known benefits. For the Cardano community building and providing solutions in other markets this project serves as a simple and concrete example of actual business use for this technology. This proposal would accumulate to "the sum of realized production pilots or launches in 2022".
The main challenge is the timeline of the Ethiopian ministry of Education to actually transferring educational records to Atala PRISM and the fact that this program is currently focused only on high school students and therefore these results can not immediately be scaled to all the recruitments in the country.
Fairway will be able to provide the proposed solution and deliver on the goals in time as long as Atala PRISM will be on time on the mainnet of Cardano and Atala PRISM is actually utilized in educational sector for high school graduates that are in any way suitable for actual recruitment (eg. part time / summer jobs). Fairway is also looking into an international expansion to other developing markets and the developed utilization for VC's in Atala PRISM can be utilized in other markets and other credentials as well.