Make Nigerian Vocational Skills Credentials Portable and Trusted

Nigeria's vocational education and training sector produces hundreds of thousands of graduates every year from NABTEB, technical colleges, and informal apprenticeships. But the credentials these programmes issue are inconsistent in quality, unknown to employers outside the issuing state, and easy to forge. Skilled workers are therefore consistently undervalued relative to their actual competence. Your challenge is to design a portable, trusted vocational credential system for Nigeria. It must cover at least five trades, be verifiable by any employer via phone without internet, be tamper-proof, and be acceptable to both NABTEB-certified programmes and informal apprenticeship completions. Submit a system design document (max 10 pages) including: credential issuance process, verification technology, how quality equivalence is assessed across different training providers, a governance model for who controls the system, and a rollout plan across three states. Judging criteria: 35% technical security and verifiability, 30% breadth and inclusiveness of trades covered, 20% governance model, 15% employer adoption strategy.