Ethiopia’s Ministry of Science and Technology has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with IOHK, the blockchain startup behind Cardano – the sixth largest cryptocurrency by market cap. The African country wants to leverage Cardano’s technology in the agriculture sector.
Charles Hoskinson, the head of Cardano, announced the event via Twitter on Thursday, revealing that the project also includes training local developers to apply the technology.
“Just signed an MOU with the Ethiopian Ministry of Science and Technology to explore training blockchain developers and use Cardano in the Agritech Industry,” the tweet says.
https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/992001912752017408
According to the plan, IOHK will provide free courses on Haskell to 100 local developers since Cardano is built on that coding language. The sessions will be offered by IOHK’s development team in the capital city Addis Ababa and by IOHK’s Blockchain Research Lab members at the University of Edinburgh. The first attendees will be women.
“We are also training local blockchain developers, some of which we will hire, while the rest will go on to plough their skills into the economy. The first class will be all female, and the goal is to have graduates of that class move on to create ventures in the cryptocurrency space using Cardano technology, the first venture of its kind in Africa,” Hoskinson, who is also an Ethereum co-founder, said in a statement.
Ethiopia is weighing the use of distributed ledger technology (DLT) in supply chain management for coffee as this commodity is its key export but also in other agricultural applications. IOHK will cooperate with local startups, entrepreneurs, and ministers to explore DLT apps that can contribute to the country’s economy.
Ethiopia’s science and technology minister Ing Getahun Mekuria expressed his satisfaction with the deal by saying “Today is a great day in Ethiopia.”
The initiative will be managed by John O’Connor, IOHK’s director of African operations, from Addis Ababa.
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