How does Blockchain fit, if at all, into Education Finance and Value for Money Assessments?

• In Event: Financing education: an overview of the landscape

Proposal

Blockchain is pervasive in online news feeds as the seemingly endless uses of this technology are enthusiastically espoused by its advocates. But what is blockchain and how might it impact the education sector? Blockchain, simply put, is a decentralized transparent ledger. While the main use of blockchain is to track Bitcoin transactions in a trustworthy and transparent manner, advocates claim that the potential for this technology is much further reaching. For example, some state that blockchain can do everything from decreasing the cost of voting (e.g., from $200,000 per vote in Australia to 50 cents per vote) to allowing individuals access to critical medicine despite their location (e.g., health care providers could access an HIV positive truck driver’s medical records and supply him with the necessary medicine as he travels through different countries) (Thomason 2018). In fact, Sebastian Molineus, Director of World Bank’s Finance and Markets Global Practice, believes that blockchain will impact the financial infrastructure of developing countries. He stated “[Blockchain] is not just a fad or something that people are talking about in the abstract, it is something that is real and something that will trickle into our development work” (Miller 2017).

However, amidst all of the hype, questions regarding blockchain’s relevance to the education sector abound. This paper begins by providing a brief history of blockchain and then moves to describe how it is developed, the estimated costs, and provides examples of how the technology is currently being used inside and outside of education. The paper then adopts the unique perspective of detailing what problems blockchain is currently attempting to solve across different sectors. The author assess if these problems are prevalent in the education sector and, if so, what are the advantages and disadvantages of applying blockchain as a potential solution? In alignment with the CIES 2019 conference theme, special focus is given to education finance and value for money assessments (e.g., benefit-cost analysis and cost-effectiveness analysis) inclusive of USAID’s current push to gather cost data for its education projects and the viability of blockchain for these purposes (USAID 2017). The research concludes with a discussion of blockchain’s current applicability, if at all, to the education sector and takes the balanced perspective of considering what problems the technology could potentially create or exacerbate. The presentation will walk the audience through the main points of the paper: what is blockchain, what problems it is trying to solve, are these problems prevalent in the education sector, specifically in education finance and value for money assessments, and, if so, how could blockchain be used as a possible solution or in what instances it should be avoided.

This research relies on financial data gathered from blockchain developers and clients as well as qualitative data inclusive of desktop reviews, interviews, and online surveys from experts across different sectors. This paper will be submitted for publication following the CIES 2019 conference.

Author

• Christine Harris-Van Keuren, SALT Analytics