How blockchain certifies education, training, and experience
Results
1,000 YOUTH WILL HAVE BUILT THEIR CERTIFICATE HISTORY (OVER 700 TO-DATE)
20 COMPANIES WILL HAVE JOINED
Big Picture
There are a lot of young people in Costa Rica and other Latin American areas who are impoverished and displaced. Compounding this is a widespread inability to get quality employment, keeping them stuck in a vicious cycle of poverty and hopelessness.
The Fundación Monge is a private NGO that’s working to combat that cycle by providing access to education that can help lift young Central Americans out of poverty and improve their possibilities for social mobility. It has been doing this through its Student Leadership and Employability Program “Soy Cambio,” which helps young people successfully conclude their high school studies, opt for a technical career and competitively enter the labor market.
Problem
A huge obstacle for employers in this area is an inability to distinguish between authentic training and educational certifications, and the proliferation of facsimiles that flood the employment market in Costa Rica. So, even though programs like Fundación Monge give access to education, without certifiable proof employers are reluctant to believe it.
If potential youth workers had a way to conclusively prove their training and education, they would be very employable. There needed to be a way for trainees to show that they’ve been trained, and educational entities to show that they’ve done the training.
Enter BanQu
Solution
Sowing a Better Ecuador through Traceability and Transparency
Fundación Monge and the Innovation Lab of the IDB Group worked with BanQu to implement a traceable, accountable method by which to prove that one had been trained — one that would provide a proven, trusted, digital transcript.
BanQu became the digital rail that connects the student to the employer via Fundación Monge, which certified proof of work, language skills, internships and education. It became a true trust network, like a transaction- and participant-certified supply chain.