Introduction

This microsite contains the detailed documentation that helps any organisation get a strong understanding about ONEST and helps them go live on the network.

In today's rapidly growing and evolving world, access to quality education and skill development has become a global challenge. Our traditional education system suffers from multiple limitations like financial barriers, geographical limitation, lack of discoverability, portability and high cost of trust verification, leaving individuals with limited opportunities to acquire essential skills. To empower individuals, it is crucial to provide them with the right skills, knowledge, and opportunities to adapt and succeed in an ever-evolving environment.

Additionally, as the technology and industries advance, there is an urgent need to bridge the ever-widening skill gaps in the job market and it demands continuous upskilling and reskilling efforts. The emergence of EdTech has brought promising opportunities, but there are certain challenges faced by them also. These challenges encompass difficulties in reaching the right audience, grappling with the high operational costs associated with platform-led service models, encountering a digital divide based on platform popularity, and struggling to establish trust with users. The inability to effectively address these obstacles hampers the seamless dissemination of services and undermines the overall efficacy of educational platforms.

To address these multifaceted challenges, a paradigm shift from relying solely on centralized platforms for storing and exchanging value to embracing a decentralized network comprising interconnected ecosystem actors that facilitate the flow of value is necessary . An open network for education and skilling becomes indispensable, striving to bridge the skill gap, provide quality and trustworthy education, leverage EdTech's potential while fostering a collaborative community of learners and educators, thus empowering individuals to thrive in an ever-changing world.

Open Network for Employment and Skilling Tranformations (ONEST) fosters a fair and accessible network that is both open and decentralized, allowing individuals and organizations to harness its power to unlock their full potential, facilitating access to learning and livelihood opportunities.

The objective of setting up ONEST is to break the current siloed ecosystem where the education & content providers, education facilitators, education seekers, education facilitators & job providers operate in a fragmented and secluded manner which restricts collaborations that could have otherwise flourished into business & social partnerships aiming towards the same goal of “equitable education & skilling to enhance employability and sustainable livelihood.”

What will ONEST enable?

ONEST will enable B2B & B2C discovery and transactions and will help address the needs of service providers as well as service consumers in the education and job ecosystem by establishing platform-agnostic interoperability on the same analogy of UPI. Organizations and individuals will also be able to broadcast their services & content facilitating a democratic and informed approach facilitating “freedom of choice” to end consumers select the services from a surplus pool of providers of their choice as per their preferences in terms of services, location, and affordability. The initiative also envisages a mechanism to identify each other uniquely, trust each other, and store their credentials including proof of work in machine-readable formats which are portable and verifiable across different tenets, to help them build reputation and credibility.

Read more here.