DirectEd – Direct donation for education

Many talented students in low-income countries lack the economic means to realise their potential, but philanthropists hesitate to donate. The impact of their funds is unclear, but attaching conditionality to ensure that funds are used for its intended purpose is costly. Administrative costs are also high due to high transfer costs and the need for having several middlemen. DirectEd solve these problems by combining the power of decentralised identities and blockchain technology to provide a transparent, secure, and low-cost means of making conditional peer-to-peer donations directly to students.

This is a description of the process flow in chronological order, from DirectEd identifying relevant high schools, to students receiving scholarships.

1. DirectEd identifies high schools in low-income areas. In Ethiopia, these schools have been onboarded to the Atala PRISM decentralised identifier system. In Kenya, we help schools become issuers of verifiable credentials. We link those DIDs to Cardano wallets, preparing the students to receive scholarships.
2. DirectEd specifies a smart contract for each high school. The smart contracts do three things: (a) specify the threshold for scholarship eligibility, (b) randomly choose scholarship winners amongst eligible students, and (c) specify conditions for scholarship disbursement.
3. Donors pledge donation amounts to one of many smart contracts, each representing a high school. Initially, only ADA donations will be supported, but over time other currencies will be accepted as well, starting with stable coins, then other crypto currencies, and lastly fiat currencies. Donors receive an NFT minted by DirectEd, that can be used to prove that they have donated and unlock access to a progress tracking page for the specific cohort they donated to.
4. High schools issue credentials, containing grades, to decentralise identifiers (DIDs) belonging to students. The students can then apply for a relevant scholarship through an oracle solution.
5. Once the scholarship application window is closed, a lottery amongst eligible students decides the scholarship winners.
6. Students register at university and the registrar issues a credential to the student’s DID. Students share their proof of registration to the smart contract, which triggers the next scholarship disbursement.
7. Further disbursements are similarly conditioned on evidence of successful progress as evidenced by verifiable credentials issued by the univesity.
8. If scholarship students fail to satisfy some of the conditions within the pre-specified time frame written in the smart contract, whatever remaining funds is returned to the donor address.