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Education systems are currently undergoing significant changes due to emerging technologies and the digitalization of the educational environment (Fedorova & Skobleva, 2020). The world is driven by the knowledge economy (Baldi et al., 2019) and education answers societal developmental demands. Education provides the labour market with the high-level capabilities and knowledge required for economic growth and development (Kontzinos et al., 2019). In most cases, certification is the major factor in determining the quality of education (Ojerinde & Akintunde, 2014) and acts as the basis to confirm the relevance of the individuals’ education (Awaji et al., 2020). Thus, certification of competence and academic qualification serve as evidence of skill, competency, and knowledge (Gräther et al., 2018, Saleh et al., 2020).
Globally, formal certification of academic laurels determines admission opportunities into higher institutions of training and development. The academic qualification also forms the basis for hiring a particular skill for a specific job (Ojerinde & Akintunde, 2014). Consequently, some job seekers looking for employment opportunities and some applicants seeking admission into higher academic institutions sometimes fake their academic credentials. Even some government officials obtain their certifications from unscrupulous educational institutions (Nguyen, et al., 2020). Fake certificates are a serious problem in the field of educational credentials (Arenas & Fernandez, 2018; Gräther et al., 2018). This problem has led to a loss of integrity and credibility in the certificate itself and the certificate awarding institutions, resulting in eroding of public confidence and trust in the educational certification system (Harold & Eckstein, 2014; Khoabane, 2014; Saleh et al., 2020).
The processes and procedures for the issuance of academic certifications have gone through a lot of transformation. The current authentication and certificate validation methods that enable employers and recruiters to electronically validate individuals’ claimed academic credentials are inadequate (Awaji et al., 2020), particularly within the West African sub-region. Sometimes, time-consuming human methods for verification are employed (Kontzinos et al., 2019). These normally lead to delays in verifying the genuineness of academic certificates. When electronic records are used, certificate awarding institutions and higher institutions of learning typically keep records of students’ certification details in proprietary databases (Turkanovic et al., 2018). Access to these databases to cross-check the authenticity of these certificates is limited to selected staff of the institution awarding the certificates and, in some cases, to accredited higher educational institutions (Turkanovic et al., 2018; Khoabane, 2014; Pido, 2014).