Mia Harbitz - Motivations and Constraints of Actors in the Field of Identity Management

Thank you. So here and there you go. Yes. So good afternoon, everyone. Let me first clarify a couple of things. I am not here representing the world bank. I am not speaking on behalf of the world bank. So all the opinions here are my own and not those of the world bank. And I also need to clarify, when I talk about identity management, it's not necessarily what technologists interpret as identity management. I have worked all my professional life in developing countries and continue to work in developing countries.

So this should also be this presentation is also focusing on what goes on in developing countries. When it comes to identity management in developing economies or countries, it's all about gaining access for the disenfranchised, but it's also a matter of getting better information, better statistics for the decision makers in these countries.

And again, when I talk about identity management, I focus exclusively on what is needed to obtain or create a legal identity that is birth registration for the purpose or civil registration, including birth registration, for the purpose of issuing a birth certificate or any other certificate as a legal document to gain access, but also the continuing, adding other attributes to create a more secure and unique legal identity by adding biometrics, a photo signature, et cetera.

In the projects that I worked on, we also try to ensure communication or possibility of verification or authentication for what are secondary and tertiary identity credentials. This is actually something elaborate based on N definitions. So in the national identity management environment, there are basically four clusters of actors. The most important here is the government and the long list of responsibilities that the government and its representative has to take into consideration to run the country. Then there are the citizens and residents needs in a development country.

International development organization are also present and as well as the industry and industry is both vendors providers, and I've put academia in that category as well. These countries, as well as the more developed countries have increasing or experience increasing needs for verification and authentication of identity. This has bearing on a lot of areas, governance areas, like I said, it's about access to benefits, privileges, civic rights. That is the objective or main goal of an identity management system in a developing country.

Many of you may know that the world bank has done research looked at 198 countries, all public registries there, and estimated that possibly as many as 1.5 billion individuals have no way of proving who they are. They live mainly in remote areas. And the majority of these people are living in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia in the poorest countries. And usually they live in and not, but not always in, in remote areas. My most of my professional career I've spent in Latin America, but also worked extensively in Africa. These pictures are from Peru and Peru.

Over the past 15 years have gone from a fairly high level or percentage of unregistered individuals to achieving almost according to their numbers. They have 99.8% registration rates. And I actually believed them after having worked there, they have combined the services for issuing identity credentials, be it certificates or national identity cards with collaborating across the government, creating incentives for people to register. They have a program called pension 65. That means that they will give a small pension to everybody over 65.

This woman in particular, she had lived until of every right old age. She doesn't actually know how old she is, but she didn't have any documents. And when she learned from the community workers from this pension 65 program, that she could get a pension by registering and getting a national ID card, she signed up her motivation was that she wanted to have a decent burial. She wanted to buy her own coffin that you could see in the background there while Peru and many other countries have achieved close to universal birth registration. Very few countries have a universal death registration.

This is important for statistical purposes for public health purposes, but also for inheritance. And in my work, I've come across cultures where they do not registering their dead because they want to give them a decent and culturally appropriate burial. So they will actually keep their dad at home. These have come across both in Africa and in Asia, when it comes to what must be done, governments have exceptionally broad mandates for if, if for stances where they have to verify and or authenticate identities.

And it's extremely difficult for these developing countries to keep up with what's going on in the technology sector. I mean, technology moves really, really fast and new technologies. New information is very difficult to stay on top of unless you're in the environment. And very often they're very broad mandates are at odds with the resources they have and their institutional capacities to execute and deliver on their mandates the industry. On the other hand, they have it all in a way except maybe the local knowledge to deliver a holistic product to these countries.

When these countries are updating, upgrading, modernizing their civil registration system or their civil identification systems with regards to the international development institutions. And here I will talk exclusively about the international financial institutions where I have worked for more than 25 years is that they are in a very privileged position to dialogue with the government because the banks usually have a very longstanding and deep relationship with governments.

There's the UN system, which also has in many instances, global reach a global reach, however, given limited resources, they have to focus on certain countries the same with the bilateral corporation. It may be Countrywide, but it's also very sector specific. And it has been really interesting. I started looking into identity as pillar for development, more than well, it's gonna be 20 years soon. And at that time there was nothing out there. So over the years, there has been a lot of developments in this area. And people seem to really understand the importance of having a legal identity.

And it's important for financial inclusion, social inclusion, political inclusion, and participation, but it's a very difficult area to work in, especially on ground. And I'm wondering if it's a little bit naive to think that we can overcome constraints and we can harmonize, harmonize the expectations, the missions, the goals of the different players in this field, but things are happening about three years ago, two and a half years ago, the world bank launched its identity or identification for development.

And they have come up with overarching, very overarching principles for identity in the development arena. And I think most important among these are the inclusion factor inclusion, both with regards to coverage of services, registration services, but also accessibility and not only for registration service, but also for other services that require proof of identity. And one that I'd like to emphasize is the sustainability.

When thinking long term, when programs and projects are designed and last but not least is the governance aspect of this because both banks and, you know, the international development community, the industry at the end of the day, at the end of the project, they will leave and it's up to the government to take it on. And I think we have a shared responsibility to design and project and deliver products. So they are sustainable even when we are on the last flight out on Friday afternoon.

So, you know, the, what is possible to do is really not a whole lot because we come from different come is from different angles. However, there are things that we, I think we can agree upon the foundation of any legal register, civil civil register or civil identification register is really the legal framework. And that is uniquely the responsibility of the country.

My experience is that the development organization and particularly the banks are very reluctant to get involved in this because of the long-term repercussions that they can have when it comes to strengthening the institutional framework. This is an area where both the international development organization, the global, as well as the banks, as bilateral development and NGOs have some experience and can be of support. And when it comes to information technology, this is really the cherry on the, on the top of, of the cake in the sense that this is the last thing that needs to be designed.

I have seen so many instances of where hardware and software have been procured and have been sitting in dusty storage rooms for years, often decades, and is of absolutely no use when they finally get their legal framework and institutional arrangements and capacity in place. Then they need to buy this again. So when projects programs are the signed solutions that need meet the needs of the countries must be found.

And I think we have a shared responsibility to improve the capacity of the governments to do both legal and regulatory work, increase the institutional capacity, improve and strengthen the administrative capacity as well as provide guidance and support as much as we can. And to finish with a quote by when Churchill said that perfect solutions are impossible in an imperfect world, but we should still try to do whatever we can from our different points of work or objectives of our different areas, that the different areas that we represent. So thank you very much for your attention.

Thank you very much. Mia, one short question, since there are so many technology providers here in the room, is there anything you would wish they could do to support your project?

Oh, a whole lot. A whole lot, because technology is the way everybody, you know, the road forward and there is so much need in developing countries. Very often you will find one person who is really trying to drive this, but does not have the resources. There is no learning capacity.

I mean, people cannot go to universities. People do not have access to learning opportunities, so there's a lot to be done. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.