These days, when some graduates go all the way to forge academic records, it might be quite a daunting task for recruiters to commence a long journey of academic result verification.
On the other hand, genuine students who need to get their certificates ready to move to the next level might not find it easy in getting their hands on their hard-earned certificate, thus they get denied of pursuing advancement in their career or professional path.
One innovation that has come to solve this challenge is the Akowe App founded by Ayodeji Agboola a Digital Advertising Professional and also CEO at FlyMyAds.
Akowe App is an education management platform with a trusted digital wallet for academic records. The platform issues certificates digitally and securely using Akòwé’s issuance engine and according to its website, it produces 1,000 certificates in less than 30 minutes.
Simply put as the platform helps students/graduates across Sub-saharan Africa improve their career chances while also helping educators in issuing certificates.
In these 3 steps according to the website, you can obtain your digital certificate by:
- Uploading your certificate design leaving only the name and the issue date blank
- Uploading your list recipients in a simple spreadsheet including the email addresses of each recipient. A sample is available when you log in.
- Sending it which you will see the progress as the certificates are issued to each recipient.
According to Ayodeji, Akowe started as a much-needed solution to an internal challenge at work. “We run a training outfit and needed to issue certificates to about 20,000 participants we had trained in the course of the year.”
After exhausting several available options, Ayodeji decided to build the digital certificate issuing platform.
According to Ayodeji, it is a time-consuming process for creating student certificates manually. “We are also solving the problem of certificate verification as the authenticity of manual physical certificates are usually hard to verify”
Further explaining Ayodeji explained that for the platform’s certificate issuance, educators simply upload their certificate design, upload a list of recipients, and Akowe does the rest by creating the certificate and emailing it to all the recipients on the list.
While for its credential verification, in addition to certificates issued via Akowe, which are already verified, “we are constantly aggregating other verified academic records onto our platform. Making it a one-stop solution for recruiters, foreign universities and other institutions who need to verify credentials.”
Akowe App has been well received in the market, according to Ayodeji with over 7 corporate organizations currently using Akowe. The platform has issued over 18,000 digital certificates to date.
The platform will soon unveil its verification service, where for a start, recruiters will have the ability to search through about 250,000 verified records. According to the founder, Akowe has been fully bootstrapped since inception and we are currently raising our seed round.
“We see Akowe as the largest database of verified and verifiable academic records in Sub-Saharan Africa secured by blockchain technology.”
Ayodeji after graduating from the Founder Institute (FI) program is now a mentor at the Silicon Valley pre-seed accelerator chapter in South Africa.
According to him, FI was a stepping stone for Akowe. “It exposed a good idea to a great platform, and the result is the even more robust platform that Akowe is becoming. FI has also expanded my network to a great blend of local and international advisors who continually point us in the right direction.”
“We are building something truly unique at Akowe and we would be looking to hire some really smart hands pretty soon.”, Ayodeji concluded
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