Diwala
Thea Sommerseth Myhren is the CEO and Co-Founder of Diwala. Before founding the company, Thea has worked as the founder of a coaching start-up called TSM. She has been sitting on the Board of the Oslo Fintech Hub for over four years and holds Master of Arts in Design Thinking and Digital Technology from Hyper Island.
What is the Challenge?
Today, displaced individuals and people in emerging markets are challenged by high costs and slow manual processes to verify the authenticity of their skills, identity and credentials. As a result, these individuals have to deal with tedious and out-dated credentialing processes, and are in some cases forced to repeat years of education. This leads to both loss of productivity and inflated unemployment.
What is the Solution?
Diwala has created a platform that enables schools and NGOs to issue skill-based identities, backed by blockchain technology. A skill-ID is a digitally verified record of a person’s educational and work history. Diwala is building an ecosystem of trust, by enabling educational institutions and organizations to safely and digitally issue and verify credentials. This will, in turn, save all parties time, money and build a bridge for global work opportunities for untapped talent.
Complementing the platform, Diwala has built an app that allows students to easily receive, store and share credentials of both soft and hard skills. By utilizing a decentralized identity management tool, Diwala’s application will also give people ownership of their data information.
Diwala is currently executing pilots regularly, to optimize the features and security of the platform in both Kenya and Uganda. These are the first ever digitally verified certificates backed by decentralized identity and blockchain in Africa.
What EQT Foundation loves about Diwala
In a world with increasing movement of people, Diwala provides a high-technology solution to one of the most crucial labour market issues on the planet. EQT Foundation is impressed with the win-win-win solution that Diwala represents with their platform. While it significantly reduces the workload and resources spent by employers on verification, every individual has the opportunity to show their merit. This makes the labour market much more equitable and contributes to equal opportunities, especially for displaced people.
Something that EQT Foundation considers particularly interesting is the fact that the technology is able to cater all kinds of individuals and firms, not only limited to the developing world. Identity and skill verification are crucial in an increasingly digitalizing and internationalizing economy, and are allow all people to show their true qualifications.
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