Diwala is a Norwegian-based company that is focused on building opportunities for youth, addressing the global issue of identity theft and certification fraud. 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. Imagine that you had to flee your own home because of war. Like Aıscha Najjar, a Syrian doctor turned refugee immigrated to the United States to pursue her dream of work & a safe home. Yet, due to loss of information, she was forced to repeat medical school in the United States. If she had a verifiable skill identity, she might have had the privilege of practicing medicine without any questions. Aıscha`s story amongst others epitomizes the challenge Diwala is addressing. To tackle this challenge, 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. Working with their implementation partner Clarke University in Kampala, Diwala recently issued the first set of skill-identities to both students and administrators. These are the first ever digitally verified certificates backed by decentralized identity and blockchain in Africa