The Democratic Republic of Congo has announced the launch of a blockchain-based platform to store and verify the authenticity of state-issued diplomas.
Dubbed the e-Diplôme platform, the initiative is designed to help the country’s education system better manage academic records and improve transparency.
The details
- According to reports, the platform was opened to the public on July 18 at a Council of Ministers meeting in the country's capital, Kinshasa.
- Essentially, individuals can upload their certificates on the platform, get them stored onchain and receive a QR code to enable access to the verified documents at any time.
- Only certificates issued by the country’s ministry of education and new citizenship can be uploaded and verified by the platform.
- However, as is the case with all blockchain-based systems, the platform’s immutability is based only on the information fed to it.
- As a result, it may be blindsided by diplomas that may have been forged before they are uploaded on the platform, presenting fake as original.
Key quote
- The DR Congo’s minister of communications and media, Patrick Muyaya Katembwe said:
“The e-Diplôme platform represents a decisive turning point in the modernization of the Congolese education system. This major step towards transparency, modernization, and digital sovereignty positions the DRC’s education system as a model of governance in Central Africa.”
Zoom out
- DR Congo follows in the footsteps of Mauritius and Tunisia, two African countries that have recently instituted blockchain-based systems for verifying credentials and certificates.
- In March, Mariblock reported that Tunisia joined other Arab nations to adopt the blockchain-based Unified Arab System for Diploma Authenticity Verification.
- The country’s decision-makers expressed optimism at the potential of the system to fight certificate forgery and expand opportunities for Tunisian nationals to access foreign education.
- Mariblock also reported in 2023 that Mauritius was adopting a similar system to verify the authenticity of government-issued certificates onchain.
- Mauritius’s eVerify system was a spinoff of Singapore's Open Attestation built on Ethereum, which verifies documents by checking against a blockchain hash value assigned to the document.
