CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Background to the Study
According to J.A. Garay (2015), academic certificates are highly esteemed as they serve as an indicator of the human capital of their bearers. Human capital refers to the skills, competencies, knowledge and aptitudes achieved through education. Academic qualifications are particularly important in employment situations as they serve as a guarantee of not just the knowledge, expertise and skills of the holders but also of their abilities, reliability and dedication . From the perspective of the bearers, Moses (2018)found a positive correlation between educational attainment levels and better employment prospects and economic security..
The world over, with no exception to Nigeria, the incidences of false academic credentials have become prolific. Every sphere of endeavor is affected by the fake degree phenomenon. In 2017, for example, not less than 40,000 people within a city were reported to have entered into the Indian labor force with fake credentials (Trines, 2017). Also, in Nigeria, among graduates who were mobilized to serve in the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) in one of the 2019 batches, sixty of them were found to possess fake credentials. On another occasion, the NYSC was compelled to contact the National Universities Commission (NUC) over supposed graduates who were seriously lacking the abilities and intelligence commensurate to a real graduate (This Day, 2019).
Individuals who desire to attain an overall betterment while boycotting the cost, time, and hard work a genuine certificate demands indulge in certificate forgery. Also, the means and opportunity to claim a fake degree is unprecedently easy nowadays (Attewell & Domina, 2011). However, Douglas cited in (Eckstein, 2003) believes that the major reason academic fraud in the form of fake documents is continually increasing is due to the failure of institutions and organizations to examine degrees and credentials.
Eckstein (2003) points out that moves to improve the educational sector would prove futile except that such issues as fraudulent qualifications were adequately addressed. Many strategies to combat this menace have proven abortive and have not measured up with modern techniques deployed in academic fraud.
The blockchain technology has emerged as a vital mechanism for tamper-proof digital records and is fast becoming applicable in different industries. Poorni et al. (2020), described that blockchain is a decentralized communication and data management solution that is just budding and needs no trusted third party. Without recourse to a central authority, various parties can provably transact on the technology even though they do not trust themselves. Srivastava et al. (2019) also emphasized that blockchain addresses the problems related to certificate verification by offering verifiable digitally time- stamped records that are resistant to modification. The blockchain, initially associated with virtual currency, has quickly gained prominence in different other areas of life. Without the need for a controlling entity, transactions can be initiated and validated on the blockchain. This features its unique selling point. To this end, studies have identified blockchain technology as possessing the potentials to address the problem of authenticating certificates adequately.
This study will be contributing to this emerging area of research by developing a guide for the adoption of blockchain technology for certificate verification systems in Nigeria and other developing countries. This chapter provides preliminary information on the study by defining the problems in Section 1.1, stating the objectives that it aims to achieve in Section 1.2 and setting the frame of reference for the rest of the paper in Section 1.3.
Statement of the Problem
Verifying degrees is an important process to combat fraud, and build trust in the applicant. Yet, the verification of degrees has not kept up with the advancements in technology, and is often a cumbersome manual process. Consequently, many organisations skip the verification, and trust the applicant on their word, creating a breeding ground for fraud.
It should be trivial for any organisation to verify the claimed degree of an applicant. As long as it is not trivial to do so, there are inefficiencies in the job-, and higher educational-application process. Below, some of the main problems in these cases are highlighted.
First, from the perspective of the company offering a job. Companies often receive more applications than there are job offerings available. Sifting through all these applications is a tedious process. In some of the supplied documents for the applications there might be omissions, exaggerations or even flat out lies. Doing a simple degree verification upfront makes sure that no unnecessary time is wasted on applicants who do not meet the correct educational requirement.
Universities have a similar problem. The admission offices of universities get flooded with applications. In popular migration country like Nigeria , people are abusing university applications in order to falsely receive a student visa Chukwu (2020). The task of the admission office is to filter the legitimate students from the unqualified and frauds. Fast verification of the degrees could greatly improve the efficiency and thoroughness of this process.
It is also to the best interest of alumni, degree holders, to support fast verification of degrees. This inefficiency in the job application process causes longer waiting times for the applicants. Besides, the requirement of a physical copy of the degree is redundant in this digital age. So, a solution towards automatic verification will be beneficial for the issuer, holder and verifier of the degree.
The main hindrance towards automatic verification is the absence of an electronically equivalent of an educational degree. The transformation from a paper degree to an electronic one might seem straightforward. However, transferring the authenticity features of a degree, i.e. a signature, is difficult to do without opening up the possibility to create fake degrees.
Some efforts have been made to create a solution for this problem using blockchain technology. Several projects created tools to notarize the proof of credentials like an academic degree on the Bitcoin blockchain (Benjamin Boeser, 2017; Blockcerts, 2018a; Manuel Araoz, 2018; UNIC, 2017). However, these systems do not abide all the user needs for all stakeholders in this case.
At the moment of writing this research there aren’t any widely adopted projects that use Ethereum or another smart contract platform to tackle the aforementioned problems. In this research these technologies are studied, and used to design a decentralized degree issuance and verification system
