When Cape Town Changed the World of Credentials

It was, by any measure, a remarkable week for South Africa. Cape Town — the Mother City — was hosting not one but two watershed moments in the country’s educational history. The South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) was marking its 20th birthday, and in the very same breath, the country was playing host to the Annual General Meeting of the Groningen Declaration Network (GDN), an international body committed to the digital future of academic credentials. The venue: the UCT School of Business. The mission: to connect the world, one qualification at a time.

The 5th Annual Groningen Declaration Network (GDN) Meeting was hosted by the South African Qualifications Authority in Cape Town from 17–19 May 2016. It formed part of a week-long series of events that SAQA used to mark its 20th anniversary year.

South Africa had bid for and won the right to host the GDN’s AGM — a fact that filled SAQA’s then-Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Julie Reddy, with undisguised pride. “SAQA bid to host the meeting in South Africa,” she said that week, “and SAQA was awarded this event. So, we’re very pleased.” It was, she made clear, one of many achievements in a 20-year journey that had taken South Africa from the rubble of apartheid’s education system to the front ranks of global qualifications innovation.

Twenty Years of Building Something New

SAQA was born out of necessity and conviction. “SAQA was established by one of the first transformative pieces of legislation in the country,” Dr. Reddy explained. “It was a very critical period. The South African Qualifications Authority was established to develop the National Qualifications Framework — a unified framework for all qualifications, to bring education and training into one sort of system in the country, given our history.”

In the two decades since, the scale of SAQA’s achievements had become formidable. A National Learner Record Database had been built, housing close to 17 million learner achievement records. Policies on recognition of prior learning, credit accumulation and transfer, and assessment had been developed and entrenched. And 28,000 records belonged to South Africans who had earned their qualifications through the recognition of prior learning — people whose skills, acquired through experience rather than formal study, had at last been counted and affirmed.

“We promote the recognition of prior learning, which is a major achievement in South Africa,” Dr. Reddy said. “We do not publicise that they achieved it in this manner. We don’t want to demean the way they achieved it — because an achievement is an achievement.”

But celebration was not the only item on the agenda. On the same week as SAQA’s birthday, a new institution had been launched: the African Qualifications Verification Network, born from a meeting of 14 African nations who had come together to promote genuine qualifications across the continent. “These are sort of partnering arrangements,” Dr. Reddy explained, “where we will work together to streamline and quickly assess whether a qualification is genuine that was awarded in other countries on the continent.”

An EduCoin for the World

Into this moment stepped the Groningen Declaration Network — an organisation whose ambition was nothing less than the full digitisation of academic credentials worldwide. At its helm was Victoriano Giralt, the Network’s then-President, who had travelled from Spain to Cape Town. Alongside him was Herman de Leeuw, the GDN’s then-Executive Secretary, whose Netherlands-based operation served as a living proof of concept for what the GDN was proposing.

“The idea,” de Leeuw explained, “is that students or citizens worldwide should be able to bring their data on education or work experience in a digital way. You may think of it like a Bitcoin — but we call it an EduCoin. We want people to be able to upload their educational data in an authorised form so that they can download and share with whomever, wherever. And this will really bring lifelong learning to life. This will foster mobility.”

The Bitcoin analogy was no rhetorical flourish. De Leeuw was describing a blockchain-style infrastructure for academic records — tamper-proof, decentralised, and permanently verifiable. “If we apply Bitcoin technology to the student data,” he said, “your credentials will not be able to be changed, because the whole system will know that anyone is fiddling with a given academic record.” In the Netherlands, 11 billion records were already being backed up every night. Students had been able to access their own verified data since November 2011, through a triple-secure login — data they could view but not alter, and which updated automatically with every new qualification earned.

Africa: Coming Fast

The question of where Africa stood in this landscape was put directly to Giralt. His answer was measured — and encouraging. “Holland is in a very advanced position, the States are also quite advanced, and China is also in a very advanced status,” he said. “But South Africa — I would say South Africa is in the middle of coming fast. It’s one of the first of the class.”

For de Leeuw, the existing infrastructure in South Africa was already a foundation to build on. “We noticed that infrastructure is, in many parts of the world, already there or being developed by very good people — like here, SAQA. They already have the database and we already have the internet. What we’re trying to do is put all this infrastructure that is being developed at the moment into good use for transporting your academic credentials.”

The vision was of a trust network — linking databases across the globe, so that a qualification awarded in Johannesburg could be verified in Berlin in seconds, and one earned in Beijing could be assessed in Cape Town with equal ease. “If we create a network,” Giralt said, “those that are more advanced can come and easily help those that are not yet so advanced — and connect everyone easily. The world is levelling, I would say. And nowadays, it goes so fast that it levels fast.”

Who Pays — and Who Benefits?

Funding a global digital credential network was not a trivial matter, especially for a continent where internet access remained expensive and unevenly distributed. De Leeuw offered a model that had already proven itself. Students and universities would verify for free — students as the owners of their own data, universities as its providers. Employers wishing to verify a candidate’s credentials would be charged. “If you do millions of verifications a year,” de Leeuw observed, “you get a lot of money.”

There was also a compelling economic case for going digital. “Once we start to process the student mobility — no longer by paper, but digitally, where the student himself is in control — this in itself will lead to a massive reduction in cost,” de Leeuw said. “There’s a win-win.” International bodies including UNESCO were being engaged, and the GDN was confident that endorsement from such organisations — even without direct funding — would carry significant weight. “The least thing they do,” said de Leeuw, “they say: ‘We endorse this concept. We think this is the way the world should go.'”

A Beginning Worth Remembering

As the week in Cape Town drew to a close — with delegates visiting Robben Island, attending cocktail events at the Robben Island Museum, and sitting in sessions that stretched from digital infrastructure to sustainable development — it was clear that something significant had taken root. South Africa had not merely hosted a meeting. It had signalled, to the world, that it belonged at the table where the future of learning was being designed.

“The collaboration, the cooperation and bringing people together to promote genuine qualifications in the country has been very significant,” Dr. Reddy reflected, summing up two decades of SAQA’s work in a single sentence.

Ten years on, Cape Town is once again preparing to welcome the GDN. The databases are bigger, the networks wider, and the urgency — in a world reshaped by mobility, migration, and rapid technological change — is greater than ever. But it was here, in 2016, that the vision was first spoken aloud on South African soil. And it was SAQA that made it happen.