Credential Fraud is not only a Nigerian problem, it is a global menace. It thrives in developing nations because of the intense economic pressures to make a living, coupled with the fact that there is a stark absence of smart systems for verifying credentials.

Statistics as at today

According to the CEO of Background Check International, about 33% of Nigerian graduates use fake credentials to secure jobs. In recent times in Nigeria, there has been many incidences of credential fraud that has made it to the public domain. Widely reported are the Lagos State University debacle, and the alleged fake certificates from Benin Republic and Togo.

It is safe to assume that while these incidences are being ousted, there are likely many more that are currently undetected, or undetectable. And while most beneficiaries of credential fraud go undetected, the truly qualified candidates are left to bear the brunt, organizations are left wondering why they are under-performing, let alone the time and effort that will be required to re-hire for these roles if critical roles are found to be occupied by fraudulent hires.

What is the status of the Credential Verification Process currently in use today?

Tertiary educational institutions are the custodians of academic records and credentials. This is also true for professional organizations that issue certifications. While these prestigious institutions are great at educating students, the absence of modern digital systems for the issuance and verification of academic credentials have led to the broken processes currently experienced by employers of labour, foreign educational institutions and even the graduates themselves.

With the absence of smart systems to verify academic records and credentials, organizations that need to verify credentials are left to use manual tedious methods. These methods include the following:

• They email the school of the candidates with their requests
• They call contacts in the school who can conduct the verification requests
• They send representatives to physically go to the school to obtain verification reports.

The average turnaround times we found using these processes were between 2 weeks to 24 weeks. Many requests go unanswered.

How is Akowe rethinking Credential Verification?

First, we must distinguish between Academic Records and Academic Credentials. With this understanding, we can then proceed to show how Akowe’s innovation is poised to solve this problem one major step at a time.

Academic Records: These are comprehensive documents that contain a detailed account of a student’s academic history. They include grades, courses taken, transcripts, attendance records, and sometimes even disciplinary actions.

Academic Credentials: These refer to formal qualifications or certifications that a student earns upon the completion of an academic program or course. They indicate the successful achievement of a specific level of education or mastery in a particular field.

Depending on the market segment, the express need in the market is to either verify Academic Records or Academic Credentials. While employers and political stakeholders are usually more interested in verifying Academic Credentials, other stakeholders such as Embassies and other local and foreign universities are often more interested in verifying Academic Records.

After exploring various approaches to co-create a solution in collaboration with tertiary institutions, we decided to take a step back and re-imagine the solution. This led us to identify academic credentials as a low hanging fruit. Focusing on this, we developed Akowe Verify.

Are there other dependable sources of information for Academic Credentials?

This was a very worthy question to consider. We looked around for alternative dependable sources of information for Academic Credentials and we found two different sources hiding in plain sight.

Order of Proceedings – This is a tome regularly published by tertiary institutions. They usually publish this around their convocation ceremonies. This publication is a complete order of the convocation proceedings, hence its title. It contains, amongst other things, the details of all graduating students. We called this Public Academic Records. The following information is usually found in the publications:

1. • The full name of the graduating student.
   • The course that the graduating student studied.
   • The Faculty and Department they belonged to.
   • The degree they have been assigned (Sometimes this information is missing, or different across different years of same institution)
   • The grade that the graduating student achieved (1st class, 2nd class upper, etc. Sometimes, this information is missing or incomplete )
   • The year of graduation (Sometimes several graduating years are included in a single publication)
   • The gender of the graduating student (This information is rarely included and we found only one university that consistently included this information).
   • And very obviously, the tertiary institution they graduated from

The Limitations we found:

We aggregated many of these publications across different universities and across many graduating years, and conducted thorough data analysis on them and found a few important trends.

• We found a lot of formatting errors. It was sometimes hard to tell under which program or course a group of listed graduating students fell.
• We found quite a lot of spelling errors in the names of graduating students. This is critical to Identity Verification
• We found that across different universities, the same course often had a different degree awarded. Sometimes in the same university, across different years, the degree awarded also changed.
• Many of the Universities did not include gender information in the publications.

By themselves, the Order of Proceedings publications could be termed to be a dependable alternative source of information but could not be relied upon for accuracy or completeness of the required information.

This also meant that even if we were to integrate directly with tertiary institutions, some of the data that tertiary institutions were in possession of, could be outdated. People get married and change their names, errors in gender information etc, would need a more recent update.

 

Graduating Peers – With the limitations discovered in the Public Academic Records above, it was quite important to find an additional source of dependable accurate information that could corroborate the millions of data points we had already aggregated. And we thought, why not involve the graduates themselves. Graduates and their peers, in a highly controlled environment, could be a source of dependable and accurate information, especially about their own identity.

So, based off of the large searchable database we had aggregated, we invented the Peer-to-Peer Verification System ©, which we designed to accomplish the following:

• Provide and/or corroborate the missing bits of information like Full Name, Gender, via NIN integration.
• Provide and/or corroborate the missing bits of information such as course and the degree earned.
• We deliberately do not ask peers to provide information about grades.

The Peer Verification system will be rolling out in a few weeks and you can join the wait list here.

Are these two sources of information enough?

We found that it’s enough to start. We talked to a lot of HR and recruiting firms in a bid to understand the information they require for their own processes, and we found that the information from the two sources above are what they require. However, also very important is the source, the authority and the authenticity of who was providing the information.

Since Akowe is not a tertiary institution in possession of academic records of graduates but simply a technology company innovating to solve a problem in the public domain, we asked them a further question: Is the information provided, considering how it was collected and presented, enough to get you going in your verification process? Their answers were largely to the affirmative.

How about Data Privacy and Data Protection Concerns?

Indeed, a very valid concern. The Nigeria Data Protection Regulation stipulates in very clear terms who a data controller is, who a data subject is, and what their rights are. And even though the information we based our verification process on could be found in the public domain, there needed to be consent from the data subjects themselves.

This further proves why the graduates (data subjects) needed to be involved in the process. Indeed, our Peer-to-Peer Verification System © was not only essential to the process of credential verification, but it also further ensured that data subjects had control over who could see or not see their academic information and it provided them with tools for privacy and consent.

Akowe has been audited by a licenced DPCO and has been awarded its Certificate of Registration and compliance.

Does it mean we are entirely forgetting about the tertiary institutions in this process?

Not at all. Indeed, the tertiary institutions will remain the most important custodian of academic records and credentials. In the new process we are pioneering, we have made adequate room to integrate with tertiary institutions. Our entire process depends on the Public Academic Records published by tertiary institutions, we have simply aggregated these records across several institutions, making Akowe Verify very desirable to Employers, HR firms and other stakeholders, creating a powerful tool that can unlock a lot of efficiencies for all stakeholders concerned.

We have even gone as far as automatically earmarking earned revenues for tertiary institutions whose records we have aggregated and for which clients have paid for verification.

We have always been a collaborative organization and continue to remain so. This is another public call to tertiary institutions that we are very open to discussions on how we can further enhance the efficiencies needed in the space. We have also made Akowe Verify’s available over APIs making it really easy to integrate into existing HR tools and workflows.

Introducing The Verification Score

We determined very quickly that verification of academic credentials needed to be dynamic. There needed to be a clear audit-able trail of the academic credentials of a job seeker. A dependable report that showed the lifecycle of academic events from their earliest years to the present.

Even though the first degree was often the most high-stake credential to verify, based on the reasons stated above, eg, people officially changing their names, and other administrative errors, there needed to be other sources of information to create a dependable verification, and thus we could not rely on the tertiary institution alone.

We introduced The Credential Verification Score as a weighted score which we then assigned to the verification process based on what methods had been used to verify a certain record.

The verification score is a cumulative addition of the individual scores that eventually added up to 100%. Thus, credentials verified via:

• Public Academic Records is assigned a score of 30%
• Peer-to-Peer Verification System © has a maximum score of 20% from all peers
• Direct Integration with Tertiary Institution is assigned a score of 50%

In essence, 80% of the verification of any single credential still relied heavily on information from tertiary institutions while only 20% of the information came from peers. The entire process will also remain fluid and dynamic, we will likely not continue to aggregate public records once we directly integrate with tertiary institutions. Our goals and objectives is to constantly provide a dependable platform, co-inspired by many stakeholders to solve the problem of credential fraud and henceforth empower individuals and employers with verifiable credentials.

Finally…

Akowe Verify is now open for public use. We are extremely proud of the work we have done and will continue to do. We believe that the only way to greatly reduce the incidence of Credential Fraud is to do it in a collaborative manner with all stakeholders.

You can get started on Akowe Verify here.

And please feel free to reach out to us with comments, suggestions and collaboration opportunities.