Diwala's skill-powered identity platform

Diwala, a digital platform that helps people verify and create skillsets, enables growth and independency

1. We are committed to solve the dependency on paper certifications and lack of trust and information flow for a person's career background. We have done research closely with many organizations from NGOs to individuals in several countries. There are apparent issues with lack of trust in skill certifications, dependency on paper form that comes with many complications like fraud and costly amount of efforts to prevent it, and visibility for a person's career background. They permeate across communities regardless of technology level, but the effects are worse for developing countries. 

2. Our solution is a public platform that allows individuals and organizations to certify the authenticity of a person's skill, as well as allowing skillset to trade freely in a form of education to encourage collaboration and trust. Its main backing power is through blockchain technology that ensure complete visibility of information flow and status at users' consent, giving the power of safeguarding and providing credible information to individuals. A user's profile will be composed of skills proofs provided by others, and digital storage allows freedom from paper solutions' limits. Such skill transactions can also be made visible to others under owner's consent, creating trust that give the owner access to more opportunities. The mobility and transparency in information would also encourage higher visibility and reach of a person's career history, allowing them to have more career opportunities.

An extension to the platform is our adjustments for user experience of organizations. Beyond their capacity to verify skills for individuals, the visible state of information will also grant them overhead status of all beneficiaries and easier data storage and management. This is particularly important for NGOs or Institutions of smaller size to not only have access to affordable data management of skill programs, but also a credible proof of their work for funding and collaboration with other organizations.

3. Our solution will bring mobility to certify process of skill education and creation, innovating the humanitarian and education sector into an era of seamless information sharing, storage, and management. On an individual scale, our solution focuses on improving their career opportunities access through a reliable way to store a person's skillset history. Continuous and traceable information prevent loss of data once enter the platform, which is crucial for both beneficiaries and organizations in developing communities. 

Our platform uses existing technology, blockchain, to innovate a new process and identification of skills in order to solve the challenge of increased efficiency and livelihoods. By having a digital identity formed by verified skillsets and career backgrounds, anyone can ensure their career history intact with highest mobility opportunity. This extremely benefits displaced individuals, but also work migrants who seek to expand their career beyond geographical limits. Organizations involved also are capable to manage their verification histories for analysis and enable further optimization and improvement. Collaboration is more possible now with decentralized data sharing while maintaining transparency and immutable nature.

Decentralized technology is integral to your solution because that allows to move ownership from one party to the actual user. It also allows for much better collaboration between entities of education through data sharing, enabled by blockchain and cloud technology. Leaner and more efficient work is possible for the economy with close integration of uPort and mobile support (Postgres, Reach, and React-Native). All come together to provide streamlined management of information cost-effective data storage, and easy to access.

Our 1 year solution goals are:

• Reach a user base of 100,000 actively using the platform weekly

• Reach a client base of at least 10 who are either on-board or integrating the platform to their internal system

• A platform that supports major management features for organizations and early creation of skills economy for individual users

• Capable of bypassing network and technology barriers to outreach users from areas of scarce Internet

• Have major NGOs and Instistutions on-board in Uganda

• Scaling plan to 2 more East African countries

Our growth is only exponential when we are constantly pushing to reach beyond network limitations. Our vision for reaching beyond 3 years is that our platform is not only applied by multi-national NGOs, increasing our breadth of global coverage, but also shared and used by many to assist them in improving their career lives, increasing our depth in skillset coverage. People from Americas, Africans, Asia, and Europe can interact beyond their continent through the platform to bolster their skill-learning journey. 

We are deploying our platform through pilot and user-case with NGOs who are our earliest adapter in urban areas. Once we have gained user base on-board, we are expanding through B2B contact for the first year while focus on promoting B2C marketing towards growing user base naturally. Communities who are our targets would be attendees of NGOs' programs, while soon it will be through natural growth.

Currently we are not releasing our platform yet. We are in process of on-boarding 3 organizations of different sizes and background to start pilot testing with up to 1000 individual users. These organizations are NGOs or Institutions who host courses for Ugandan students, and we are expecting to be able to improve our solution through direct involvement from them. Initial benefit would be ease in management of certifications and transition from paper to digital certificates. 

The population in 1 year will be mainly Ugandans near Kampala, considerable amount of refugee in Bidibidi, as well as new users in 2 other countries. The total number will be up to at least 100,000 individual users, as well as at least 10 organizations on-board. Our users are actively using our platform as a way to manage their skill certifications earned from courses, and skills proven by direct interaction between individuals on the platform. In 3 years these numbers would grow to at least 1,000,000 through scaling.

Our core team of 4 people brings to the table the core skills of human centered design, humanitarian expertise, cultural adaptability, networking and design, blockchain expertise and data analysis. We are capable of making connections with the right talent and the right person to lead us further towards the completion of our platform and bring it to the intended market. The team also have expertise gained from high-level educational degrees of different countries, and work integrity from past positions of reputable organizations.

Our revenue model is two-fold. We have subscription model for organizations and transaction fee of certain features for individual users. For client-side, we develop a life-long relationship with customized subscription levels matching all sizes of the organization. We are capturing the potential saving of human resource and management resources organizations spending each year on certification, as well as the premium for gaining a tool for one to bolster one's reputation and funding accessibility.

Meanwhile, the individual user base will enjoy full access of basic information management. Once they want to participate in user-to-user skill markets, they will be charge a small transaction fee if payment is successful. The profitability scales with the number of users on-board. And the number of users on-board is backed by tremendous interest from organizations who want to be on-board and bring a large database of their community reach.

We believe Solve can bring us to the spotlight we need to advance our platform's presence to communities beyond our reach. With the incredible network that Solve possess, our mere tap into such resource will be a foundation that ensures our scalability and our finance stability. The potential funding from Solve to us in our early stage of development would also speed up the development process of our product to be market-ready and making faster impact for our targeted customers.

Two key barriers to our solution would be overcoming network coverage limitations and solving complicated development process of the platform. Solve's vast network can enable us to find a reliable partner towards a collaborated solution for network reach to ensure impact to our customers' lives. While Solve's funding would enable us to hire more team member to not only fasten the development process but also bringing new brilliant ideas to the platform.