An agreement was announced last week between IOHK, the company behind the Cardano cryptocurrency (ADA), and Ethiopia. IOHK will participate in the digital development of the entire country in its digitalization plan. The country aims to develop several sectors such as agriculture, health, transport and education by 2025. This announcement is not trivial, because Cardano has been focused since its inception towards a sustainable development of the blockchain: "We have understood for a long time that developing countries could particularly benefit from blockchain technology, thanks to the absence of integrated and established digital systems, but also because blockchains are less expensive than heavier infrastructures", a declared IOHK on April 29th.
The Cardano blockchain was created in 2017 to allow the deployment of decentralized applications and smart contracts, just like Ethereum. According to the CoinMarketCap site, the Cardano is used to sharply decrease the costs and energy supplied in the deployment of certain IT services, while providing many services: “The Cardano is used by agricultural companies to track fresh produce from the fields up. on the plate, while other products on the platform allow the secure storage of educational identifiers, or even curb the acquisition of counterfeit products by retailers ”.
A large number of decentralized applications run on the Cardano blockchain and thus focus on the sustainable development of developing countries.
The SingularityNET application will, for example, make it possible to deploy artificial intelligence services on the blockchain.
The World Mobile service operates on the Cardano network and allows the creation of Internet network relay points in remote areas that do not benefit from them.
Finally, the Atala PRISM application is one of the most innovative solutions, because it allows to store information relating to our identity on the blockchain in a private and secure way.
The education sector in the spotlight
Ethiopia is particularly reliant on blockchain in the education sector. Thus, no less than 3,500 schools and 5 million students should soon have access to Cardano technology. The main project is to create a national identity directory that would reside on the blockchain thanks to Atala PRISM and which would allow the progress of each student to be tracked. Even better, this tool should allow students to authenticate their diplomas abroad. Indeed, Africa Operations Director at IOHK John O'Connor says Ethiopia's digital underdevelopment has a huge impact on its overall development: “I studied at Oxford and was intrigued by the fact. that there were no Ethiopian students. When I asked about it,I was told that the university does not recognize their titles. They don't have enough information about what is going on in Ethiopian universities, ”he said. The recognition and registration of diplomas are practically unalterable on the blockchain, this should encourage some foreign universities to forge partnerships with Ethiopia more easily.
To deploy the network, structures such as schools must be equipped with the Internet. The government said it was going to invest in this, without specifying the amounts. In addition, not all students have access to a smartphone or a computer, so NFC smart cards should be distributed to store everyone's file references.
Other African countries are also interested in developing solutions around the blockchain.
This is particularly the case for Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, each with different challenges.
Cardano is not the only cryptocurrency to be interested in the development of the African continent, for example the Stellar Lumens network aims to promote financial inclusion by allowing individuals who do not benefit from banking services to be able to send and receive money. very low cost money.
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