The initiative by Abiy, in cooperation with the United Arab Emirates, to provide a certificate course on programming languages with Udacity for five million Ethiopians has turned out to be a scam.
To give you a glimpse of these courses: Udacity planned to offer four programming-related courses. Anyone who completed one course within eight weeks would earn a certificate. If a person failed, they could retake the exam until they scored at least sixty percent, as long as it was within the eight-week period.
The problem I identified is that at the end of each session, there are twenty questions. Whether you fail or not, the questions are always the same. Therefore, anyone who fails can simply try repeatedly until they pass. Since the answers become known, effectively no one will fail.
I have seen many government officials holding all four certificates, which they obtained in a single day. This is because everyone has access to all the answers. Just consider: how on earth can a person who cannot even write a sentence in English earn a certificate in one day for a course that requires serious coding knowledge? One of the courses is on HTML and CSS, which is about developing websites using programming languages. This is not easy, even for university graduates with coding experience. This Udacity program seems like a scam to me.
If you are familiar with Harvard's online courses, things are completely different. Everything is secure and rigorous. If you manage to get a certificate from their platform, it is a significant achievement because you cannot cheat.
Therefore, I see no value in obtaining a certificate from Udacity. The government has made it mandatory for every civil servant and others to hold these certificates. Now, all the civil servants have these four certificates, earned in a single day. How shameful.