What Proclamation 1205/2020 actually says about your signature
The law that made electronic signatures binding in Ethiopia is shorter and more practical than its reputation. Here is what it asks of you.
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Working notes on signing, proving, keeping.
What we learn building the evidence layer under Ethiopian paperwork — the law as it is actually written, the things that break at scale, and the arguments we have had with ourselves in public.
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The four questions a signed document has to answer
Integrity, identity, time and history. Everything that makes an electronic document defensible reduces to these four, and each one has a different failure mode.
How the tamper-evident seal works, and what it is not
A plain description of what eFirma does to a completed document — fingerprint, sealed record, hash-linked trail — and an equally plain account of what that does not make it.
Why a passcode, and what it actually proves
One-time passcodes over SMS and email are the most-questioned part of the signing flow. The questions are fair, and the answers are more interesting than “it's secure”.
Designing a signing flow for two scripts at once
Amharic is not a language file you switch on at the end. What building bilingually first changed about the document, the notifications and the audit trail.
Two thousand signatures, one afternoon
What actually breaks when the same document goes to two thousand people, and what we changed in bulk campaigns so it does not break in public.
Taking an electronic document to a registrar
What to bring, what to expect, and how to prepare a counterparty's lawyer for a file they have not seen before.
Easier to show than to write about.
Send one document free and look at what comes back with it — the seal, the timestamps, the trail. Everything above, on a document of your own.
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