Recruitment Utilizing Atala PRISM

[IMPACT]

Ethiopia has taken a big leap towards radical digitalization by signing a deal with IOHK on utilizing Atala PRISM and Cardano Blockchain for educational records in the country This deal created a lot of discussion and buzz in the Cardano community as it was one of the largest if not the largest and most remarkable blockchain deal ever made utilizing a truly decentralized blockchain project. This comes as a major step forward as Ethiopia is not highly digitalized and was just recently without a proper internet coverage or access to international banking services.

There is a push for modern technologies and blockchain that makes us all optimistic about the future of Cardano and African countries, especially Ethiopia, on forefront of the adoption. However the real world experience and adaption on the ground is not yet as we all expect it to be, highly functional, futuristic and fair. We know this especially well at Fairway. 50% of our team lives in Ethiopia or at least has an Ethiopian ID. And the rest of us spent a large part of Q3-Q4 of 2021 traveling the beautiful and potential country establishing our business, making market research and building connections and partnerships. Among many important business leaders and government officials we also got a chance to meet the IOHK leadership team who highly encouraged us to seek funding on the Project Catalyst (John O'Connor and Dynal Patel mostly) and later, recently asked us to join PRISM Pioneer Program.

"The Cardano Deal" currently covers Ethiopian high school students and is still on works which means it will take a while before every type of educational record in the country will actually exist on the Blockchain. But it is happening. And it seems the local businesses and operators have no idea of it. And that is not the only part of the recruitment or document handling process that is not digital. In fact there seems to be a great lack of digital services on many fronts in this area. (Please check our attachment on local recruitment methods on a billboard.) Businesses are highly interested in technology and modernization, but still have to rely on traditional manual methods mostly on paper where the document handling is overwhelming and susceptible for fraud. Additionally the in-house recruitments as well as established recruitment consultancy services are crippled by allegations of corruption and nepotism as are some of the major institutions and businesses as well.

The lack of digitalization in the recruitment processes in Ethiopia makes all the developments in the job market slow, ineffective and prone to error. Still, this is a market that needs these these technologies maybe the most. Ethiopia has 115 million people and the population is very young. The need for new jobs is extensive and every posting for an open position for skilled labor receives hundreds or thousands of applications. And as we have experienced, some businesses might have even thousands of open positions yearly.

When it comes to the current stage of the technological development, internet, hardware and blockchain, this technology will soon be there to achieve higher levels of digitalization. The problem is the lack of tools and processes to provide businesses easy access to these Credentials as part of their ordinary recruitment process. As long as adequate software and tools are not provided to handle recruitment, these businesses will still have to rely on paper based documentation as part of the manual and paper based processes.

Fairway is a startup providing recruitment SaaS to developing markets. Our product is on piloting period and will launch for public in Addis Ababa on Q2 of 2022 and will expand international markets in Africa in 2023. Ethiopia is the first country issuing educational records as VC's on Cardano and Fairway aims to be the first business in the market actually utilizing those records. We are connecting educational records and credentials on Atala PRISM to our recruitment platform and running a pilot to achieve the first ever proven recruitments conducted utilizing these VC's in Ethiopian market. After proposed developments are finished the Ethiopian students holding educational records in Atala PRISM will be able to have their VC's verified in Fairway platform and directly prove their educational records to recruiters using our platform as part of the recruitment process. Job seekers holding educational records on Atala PRISM will have a direct advantage in the job seeking process. This introduction of PRISM and Credentials will directly benefit both parties involved in the recruitment.

Fairway platform currently focuses on recruitment of skilled labor ie. university students and graduates whereas the current focus on Atala PRISM based educational records is on High School Students and graduates. In addition to software development, Fairway also needs to do dedicated customer acquisition and run a pilot project for recruitments focused on high school graduate level recruitments which requires additional work and funding. By building this integration and testing it, Fairway can help internal and international recruiters to easily verify the candidate's VC within the recruitment platform.

This solution will accelerate the real world use of Cardano based DID's. For the Cardano community focused on DID's and for the Ethiopian Ministry of Education utilizing Atala PRISM this proposal highlights the utility of the approach and its attractiveness to foreign businesses. Fairway is verifiably the first foreign business in Ethiopia utilizing this new method of storing and sharing educational records in a large scale which showcases its promise to attract foreign investment among other known benefits. For the Cardano community building and providing solutions in other markets this project serves as a simple and concrete example of actual business use for this technology. This proposal would accumulate to "the sum of realized production pilots or launches in 2022".

The main challenge is the timeline of the Ethiopian ministry of Education to actually transferring educational records to Atala PRISM and the fact that this program is currently focused only on high school students and therefore these results can not immediately be scaled to all the recruitments in the country.

Fairway will be able to provide the proposed solution and deliver on the goals in time as long as Atala PRISM will be on time on the mainnet of Cardano and Atala PRISM is actually utilized in educational sector for high school graduates that are in any way suitable for actual recruitment (eg. part time / summer jobs). Fairway is also looking into an international expansion to other developing markets and the developed utilization for VC's in Atala PRISM can be utilized in other markets and other credentials as well.

[FEASIBILITY]

We propose a project to utilize PRISM-based credentials in our system to be the first real life use case of ATALA PRISM in Ethiopia and setup infrastructure to provide potential employers verified skilled labor.

We have following milestones for the project:

Milestone 1: Communicating with IOG on the data structure of the credentials and other details of the utilization of ATALA PRISM for high school students so as to identify how to utilize the data in our system.

Milestone 2: Modifying the Fairway application to include features specific to high school students. Our platform currently focuses on skilled labor, whose target employment is different from that of high school graduates. We propose to have a separate section on our platform for High school students that will focus mainly on part time jobs, internships, and temporary employment for one-of tasks.

Milestone 3: Reaching out and partnering with different companies to arrange experience gaining positions for high school students within their organizations.

Milestone 4: Development on the Fairway backend to integrate with ATALA PRISM and setup credential verification for the students. This will require building a robust application that can extract information from the student credentials and insert them into the user profile. The data gathered can then be displayed to possible employers as verified by PRISM. This will serve as a proof of concept, which can then further be implemented on graduates of higher education as the adoption of PRISM grows.

Fairway will use its resources to build an integration to Atala PRISM to become a Verifier for VC's of Ethiopian educational records. The integration will be build by two in-house developers of Fairway in the period of 3-5 months.

The deal for educational records created on Atala PRISM in Ethiopia is currently focused on high school students and graduates as opposed to university students and graduates. Fairway SaaS product currently focuses on skilled labor and utilizing it to high school graduates requires an additional pilot project for the developed solution. During the development job, Fairway will start planning on pilot project execution and start customer acquisition process for it. The finished pilot requires sales, marketing and successful pilot project on a focus group in Addis Ababa.

Timeline:

• Development starting in the late Q2 of 2022
• Development finished by the end of Q3 / mid Q4 (estimated 3 months of work finished within 3-5 months)
• Q4 spent on customer acquisition and marketing for a pilot program conducted with high school graduates entering working life in ethiopia.
• Q1 of 2023 first proved recruitments conducted utilizing educational records on Atala PRISM in Ethiopia

Development:

• Devoting one Full-Stack developer on our team to build ATALA PRISM integration with previous DID experience for 3 months: 3 x 5200$ = 15600 $
• Devoting 50% of another one of our existing developer's time to help with the integration and testing for 3 months: 50 % of 3 x 4800$ = 7200$
• Development on Fairway platform to integrate jobs for high school students features (Covered by Fairway)

Conducting targeted marketing and sales for on-boarding high school graduates to our system and finding potential customers for a pilot program 3 months after integrations

• 50% of one of Fairway sales team member for 3 months: 50 % of 3 x 3800$ = 5700$
• Hiring 2 additional sales & marketing representatives for the pilot that is 3 months = Hiring costs 2000$
• Hired 2 sales & marketing working for the 3 months: 2 x 3 x 2500$ = 15000$

Additional Pilot testing and running costs for Fairway team:

• 3000$

TOTAL: 48 500$

All of the Fairway team will be working with various subjects described in this proposal. The key focus areas and responsible team members allocated in the budget are listed below:

• The two developers allocated to this project within the 3 months development period Mearaf 100%, Kidus 50%.

• The team for customer acquisition marketing, sales and on onboarding for the High School Graduate's pilot consists of Gemechis 50% and two additional hires of marketing and sales professionals with >4+ years of experience in b2b sales in Addis Ababa

• The Piloting project for the target group is carried out by our COO Heikki with the help for customer service design and management by Jussi and Gemechis.

The describtion of relevant team members and the complete team describtion is below. First Five included in the group selfie with CH.

Henrik Metsämäki - Co-Founder & CEO, Product Develompent and strategy. Prior to founding Fairway Experience in Digital consulting and tech sales for 2,5 years and leadership experience of 2 years in Non Profit entrepreneurial organizations focused on design thinking. Actively studied blockchain space since 2017. https://www.linkedin.com/in/henrikmetsamaki/

Heikki Ruhanen - Co-Founder & COO, Partnerships, Finance and Operations. Prior to founding of Fairway experience of 2 years in leadership of creative people of Dash Design Hackathon in Aalto Entrepreneurship society. 2 years in B2B sales in marketing companies and 5-years of experience being part of Finlands startup community.https://www.linkedin.com/in/heikkiruhanen/

Gemechis Marema - CCO, Customer relationships, Sales and Product development. Over five years of experience in product development, sales, customer relationships and strategic consulting. Worked as engineer in Ethiopia and currently finishing studies on a second degree in business and information technology focusing on software development. https://www.linkedin.com/in/gemechis-marema-ba90bb1a9/

Kidus Wendimagegn Mammo - CTO, MSc in Security and Cloud Computing with a passion for building scalable, reliable, and secure software systems. Experience working as a DevOps engineer. 6 years experience working with python in different domains among which is 3 years of developing web application and API's using the Django framework. https://www.linkedin.com/in/kidusmammo/ (Done the Atala PRISM pioneer program)

Mearaf Tadewos - Full- stack development Cardano. Experienced Software Development Engineer with focus on Backend/API Development. Also certified Haskell Developer at IOHK Education. She has been working at international companies in the tech industry with cross team collaboration. Has developed an Ethereum NFT Minting and Marketplace platform. https://www.linkedin.com/in/mearaf-tadewos-634228174/

Ermias Bunaro - Head of UX, full-stack Engineer and Designer with focus on UI software. 5 years of experience in various international businesses and leading large software development teams. Skills - Markup/UI: HTML5, CSS3, Tailwind CSS, Bootstrap. Languages Java, Typescrip, JS Frameworks. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ermias-bunaro-ab4a6b4b/

Jussi Korhonen - Head of HR and Service design. Developed and executed recruitment and hr services both internally and externally for thousands of job seekers. Led tens of service design projects from variety of fields. Consulted in strategic choice making and human-centered strategy for years. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jussi-korhonen-5845a18a/

Hiski Ruhanen - Head of information Security. Hiski has worked 5-years in information security and data protection consultation, as well as internal information security expert and currently works as information security team lead at smartly.io. On top of information security knowledge Hiski has IAPP certification as information security professional. https://www.linkedin.com/in/hiski-ruhanen-10934716a/

[AUDITABILITY]

Fairway SaaS is currently run on a private pilot in Addis Ababa. By the end of Q2 of 2022 any business or individual will be available to use our platform in Ethiopian market. By the Q4 of 2022 users of the platform will find the described functions on our platform and be able to test them. If a member of the Catalyst community is a a holder of credentials on Atala PRISM in Ethiopia they will be able to utilize them in the recruitment process starting in Q4. Registration through our site available for public at the end of Q2 of 2022: https://fairway.global

List of KPI's to monitor the success of the project:

#of verifications done to proof of education credentials

#of hires done to people owning a proof of education credential

The first proven recruitment in Ethiopian markets is achieved Utilizing the Atala PRISM based Educational Records as VC's of Ethiopian High School Graduates. Cardano ecosystem has achieved a measurable successful real world recruitment where the DID system was utilized in its potential helping to achieve a succesful recruitment. Fairway will publish this on Q1 of 2023 once the success has been achieved and validates the real world promise of blockchain and Cardano.

This is more refined and targeted version of our previous proposal carrying the same name. We changed multiple things on of our previous proposal which was one proposal close to getting funded in Fund 7. https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/385095

SDG Rating

Goal 5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

Goal 8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all

Goal 10. Reduce inequality within and among countries

SDG subgoals:

10.2 By 2030, empower and promote the social, economic and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion or economic or other status

5.5 Ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life

5.b Enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women

8.1 Sustain per capita economic growth in accordance with national circumstances and, in particular, at least 7 per cent gross domestic product growth per annum in the least developed countries

8.2 Achieve higher levels of economic productivity through diversification, technological upgrading and innovation, including through a focus on high-value added and labour-intensive sectors

8.5 By 2030, achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all women and men, including for young people and persons with disabilities, and equal pay for work of equal value

8.6 By 2020, substantially reduce the proportion of youth not in employment, education or training

8.7 Take immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms

8.8 Protect labour rights and promote safe and secure working environments for all workers, including migrant workers, in particular women migrants, and those in precarious employment

8.b By 2020, develop and operationalize a global strategy for youth employment and implement the Global Jobs Pact of the International Labour Organization

Key Performance Indicator (KPI):

8.8.1 Fatal and non-fatal occupational injuries per 100,000 workers, by sex and migrant status

8.6.1 Proportion of youth (aged 15–24 years) not in education, employment or training

8.5.2 Unemployment rate, by sex, age and persons with disabilities

8.5.1 Average hourly earnings of employees, by sex, age, occupation and persons with disabilities

8.2.1 Annual growth rate of real GDP per employed person

8.1.1 Annual growth rate of real GDP per capita

5.5.2 Proportion of women in managerial positions

10.2.1 Proportion of people living below 50 per cent of median income, by sex, age and persons with disabilities