In April 2024, JAMB’s registrar, Is-haq Oloyede, stood before university stakeholders and delivered a number that should have alarmed the entire country. Out of 148 Direct Entry applications
In April 2024, JAMB’s registrar, Is-haq Oloyede, stood before university stakeholders and delivered a number that should have alarmed the entire country. Out of 148 Direct Entry applications submitted to Bayero University, Kano, only six certificates were genuine. Board-wide, JAMB had flagged 1,665 fake A’Level results in a single admissions cycle. That is not a fringe problem, but one blockchain is already helping to solve elsewhere. It is a system in which the default assumption for anyone checking a Nigerian academic certificate is that it might be false until proven otherwise.
Kenya has just given the region a live test case for plugging that leak, and it is worth Nigerian regulators paying close attention.
Through the Kenya National Examinations Council, the country has anchored more than 15 million academic records, some dating back to 1989, onto the Avalanche C-Chain, a public blockchain. Nearly a million KCSE certificates issued to 2025 candidates are now only obtainable through the digital platform, developed with a local technology provider, LegitDoc. Every record becomes cryptographically fixed the moment it is issued, queryable in seconds, not months, by an employer or a foreign university.
Before now, verifying a Kenyan academic record could take anywhere from one month for a single check to six months for high-volume recruiters, and even the QR-code upgrades bolted onto paper certificates remained tied to centralised databases that fraudsters could spoof with lookalike verification sites.
The blockchain anchor changes the trust model entirely. Instead of an employer or foreign university calling KNEC and waiting, a certificate’s hash is checked against an immutable on-chain record, and the result is either an exact match or it isn’t. There’s no intermediary to bribe, no database to hack quietly, no paper to forge convincingly.
KNEC chief executive David Njengere KNEC chief executive David Njengere framed it as candidates no longer needing to depend solely on physical documents, since they can pull, save and confirm their own credentials directly through the platform. That single change, moving verification from a physical artefact to a queryable record, is the part worth paying attention to, because it inverts who carries the burden of proof. Under the old model, the graduate had to produce a document and hope it survived scrutiny. Under this one, the record already exists independently of the paper, and the paper becomes almost incidental.
The scale of ambition is genuinely national. Coverage spans both KCPE at the primary level and KCSE at the secondary level, plus diploma programmes and teacher certification records, with the system projected to grow toward roughly 35 million verifiable records as new cohorts graduate.
It’s worth noting that Kenya was already building toward this. The rollout, which is one of the largest public-sector blockchain deployments on the continent and among the largest globally, is not an isolated blockchain experiment bolted onto a ministry press release. Kenya’s Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy had signalled as far back as October 2025 that it was exploring verifiable credentials and digital wallets to replace paper certificates entirely under internationally recognised standards.
KNEC’s deployment slots into that trajectory rather than starting it, and it follows a template Avalanche has now run in several jurisdictions: digitising over 700,000 land records in India’s Dantewada district and 42 million vehicle titles for the California DMV and is currently tokenising 370,000 property deeds worth $240 billion in Bergen County, New Jersey. Kenya’s certificates are simply the latest entry in a growing pattern of governments treating blockchains as record-keeping infrastructure rather than speculative financial rails.
How Nigeria can leverage blockchain to combat certificate fraudNow, the Nigeria question. Certificate fraud here isn’t a fringe issue; it’s an industry. Beyond the JAMB scandal, researchers examining Nigeria’s examination bodies have argued that the demand for fraudulent diplomas has become a genuinely large-scale problem, one that leaves nearly every employer exposed to fake credentials at some point, and academic papers have specifically recommended blockchain-based identity verification for WAEC, NECO and JAMB to restore trust in the system.
Academic certificate on chain WAEC already issues certificates with QR codes tied to a verification database and operates a paid PIN-based portal for institutions checking results. NECO’s e-Verify portal has existed since 2018. JAMB runs its own separate checks for Direct Entry candidates. That’s progress over pure paper, but it’s the same architecture Kenya just moved away from: a centralised system that a competent forger, or a corrupt insider with database access, can still exploit.
What Nigeria doesn’t have is a single, unified, tamper-evident layer that spans WAEC, NECO, JAMB, NYSC and tertiary institutions, one that an employer in London or a university in Toronto can query without navigating three different portals, three different fee structures and three different levels of trust in the underlying database.
That is precisely the gap a blockchain-anchored registry closes, not because the technology is magic, but because a shared, append-only ledger removes the incentive for any single institution’s database to be the weak link a forger targets.
A national framework, potentially built jointly by WAEC, NECO, JAMB and NUC under a Nigeria Data Protection Act-compliant structure, could anchor certificate hashes the way KNEC has while keeping the underlying personal data off-chain and access-controlled. Academic researchers in Nigeria have already proposed versions of this using platforms like Celo, so the appetite exists domestically; what’s missing is political will and the kind of federal-level coordination between exam bodies that Nigeria has historically struggled to sustain.
Kenya has shown the deployment is technically achievable within a single national exam body. The harder test for Nigeria is whether WAEC, NECO, JAMB and the NUC have the appetite to adopt it; that is now the open question.
