Challenges

An estimated 1.1 billion people, including many millions of children, women and refugees, globally lack any form of officially recognized identification. Without an identity, individuals are often invisible – unable to vote, access healthcare, open a bank account, or receive an education – and bear higher risk for trafficking. Without accurate population data, public and private organizations struggle to broadly and accurately deliver the most basic human services. Universally, existing systems of digital identity frustrate users, businesses, civil society and governments. Too much personal data is stored, data is siloed and inaccessible. The resulting cybersecurity risk is unmanageable. An individual’s data is fragmented across various databases, entirely beyond his or her control and hard to access.

The absence of robust evidence for the viability of user centric, portable digital identity, many governments may unwittingly be building systems with insufficient protections for user control and privacy. As such, this is a critical urgency to define the parameter of “good” digital identity and translate those principles in technical specifications. Digital identity carries significant risk if not thoughtfully designed and carefully implemented.

Challenges faced:

• The project is multi-national in nature, the policy and legal reform required varies drastically between countries
• Many governments systems offer insufficient protections for user-control and privacy

Toward a Solution

In 2017, ID2020 established an alliance to bring together governments, public and private sector organizations, including Accenture, Microsoft, Kiva and Mercy Corps. The alliance model enables a synchronized approach to digital identity initiatives by enabling diverse stakeholders to work collaboratively and by coordinating funding to support high-impact projects. (This global multi-stakeholder model is unique and designed to facilitate transparent governance and a better use of funds.)

This Alliance have introduced a new paradigm for digital ID which apply the following principles:

• Portability is necessary so that individuals can assert their identities across borders, and across time.
• Privacy and user-control is required ensure that individuals can uniquely collate their personal data, then share only what is necessary.
• Decentralization is required to ensure that everyone— including those excluded from national identity programs due to marginalization, statelessness, or privacy concerns—is afforded this basic human right.

The Alliance is funding and developing pilot programs that have direct benefits to individuals served and which generate needed evidence for the stakeholders simultaneously. A common Monitoring and Evaluation framework is applied across all ID2020 supported pilots, facilitating comparison and yielding important learnings for scalability and replicability. The Alliance is committed to pilot sustainability and scale, helping partners build an ecosystem of long-term participants in each program.

Widespread agreement on principles, technical design patterns, and interoperability standards needed decentralized digital identities to be trusted and recognized. The ID2020 Alliance is playing a market-shaping role in the digital identity ecosystem. This will give direction to technology companies as they develop new tech, steering the market towars responsible technology.

The result of this practice:

Digital ID – the set of electronically captured and stored attributes and credentials that can uniquely identify a person – offers an opportunity to leapfrog paper-based identification systems, such as civil registries.

• For individuals, digital identity allows for secure and unique authentication of a person’s identity without reliance on a paper-based credential, thereby conferring access to a range of services.
• For governments and businesses, digital identity facilitates electronic delivery of services and modernization of processes.

The ID2020 Alliance sees themselves as a coalition of the willing – a growing group of voices committed to “good” digital identity and to multi-stakeholder collaboration on technical and non-technical fronts. As the coalition gains critical mass, They are able to influence more broadly the course of digital ID and mitigate those risks.

The user-managed, privacy-protecting and portable digital ID offers numerous benefits over traditional approaches:

• Portability ensures that individuals can prove who they are across institutional and international borders, and across time
• Individuals are given control over how their personal information is collected, used, and shared.
• By allowing individuals to collect digital credentials from multiple institutions (i.e. from both a national government and an aid agency), we can close the identity gap without forcing the reliance of individuals on any single institution. This is particularly important for refugees and stateless populations, who may not be able to rely on a national government for an identity credential.

The ID2020 Alliance is working to maximize the potential of digital ID by:

• Coalescing multi-stakeholder collaboration to set its future course;
• Defining individual-centered functional requirements to influence its technical development;
• Funding pilot tests of  promising solutions in a range of environments;
• Accelerating access to digital ID to underserved, vulnerable populations;
• Advocating for the widespread adoption of ethically-grounded digital ID solutions, and assisting in their implementation.

They are currently funding and implementing pilots in Thailand and Indonesia, one focused on healthcare delivery within a refugee camp and one focused on streamlining delivery of a national LPG subsidy.