As a community, identity professionals tend to solve typical “first-world” problems in large enterprises with cutting-edge technology. But what if, beyond “KYC” and “DID,” your target audience lives on $1 a day and has no iPhone to hold a wallet with an eIDAS-compliant eID?
This talk dives deeper into real-world challenges such as birth registration and obtaining birth certificates as a foundation for getting physical ID and, possibly, an online-verifiable ID such as Aadhaar, but more secure.
A perspective on “trust anchors” reframes identity management as starting with civil registration: birth certificates, passports, and identity cards depend on a functioning Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) system that recognizes a person’s existence from birth. In places like Germany, birth registration is largely automated through hospitals and local registry offices, and a lifelong tax ID is issued shortly after birth; this can make formal identity feel like a universal given. In many rural and lower-income regions, however, large numbers of children are born without birth certificates because registration is unaffordable in lost wages, physically inaccessible due to travel distances, and impractical without smartphones, connectivity, or basic literacy.
The stakes extend beyond personal documentation to national planning and humanitarian response. Without reliable civil registration data, governments and aid organizations cannot accurately plan hospitals, staffing, schools, or the volume of food and supplies needed during crises such as droughts and famines; the foundational issue is not advanced digital wallets but basic workflows and clear authority for registering births and deaths. The UN Sustainable Development Goals include universal legal identity for all children by 2030 (including birth registration), yet progress remains far behind, especially in high-growth countries that lack CRVS infrastructure.
Several large-scale identity and registration initiatives illustrate approaches and gaps: India’s Aadhaar pursued a low-cost model centered on a simple identifier; MOSIP has been adopted by multiple African states; OpenCRVS has seen deployments in places such as the Cook Islands, Somalia, and Madagascar; and hybrid approaches seek to combine strengths. Across these efforts, recurring needs include scale, education, interoperable technology, and collaboration among service providers and vendors. A call to action encourages identity professionals to engage through organizations and ecosystems such as IDPro, development banks, UNICEF, the World Bank, and humanitarian dialogue groups, contributing expertise on national ID flows, CRVS ICT components, and operating at massive scale (including systems with hundreds of millions of records and high annual growth).
Thanks for the warm welcome. And yes, I am known as the Identity Beer Guy. The one with the physical bottle, so I brought one just to make sure you get that one. I'm here today and when I prepared this slide deck, I did not know that Elizabeth would, yesterday, deliver a very, very scary keynote on the human and civil rights implications that the identity management systems that we build every day can have on a developed society.
So, a little bit of context for this. I'm standing here today as a member of IDPro. Who has heard of IDPro? Wonderful. Who is a member?
Okay, there is a significant gap. So, for those of you who have not heard of our wonderful organization, please look it up. It's www.idpro.org and become a member. And talk to her. She is the one to go to. It's a wonderful bunch of people who drive really, really interesting discussions, and this can be seen by her keynote yesterday, which still gives me the goosebumps here.
So, what I was about to present is about the trust anchors, the gentlemen here and the ladies, what we're talking about. So, a quick raise of hands. Who of you does not have a birth certificate?
Okay, may I ask which country you're from? Okay, so I'm pretty sure you have one. Who of you has a passport?
Okay, yeah. Who of you has a physical identity card? I know that they don't exist in the US, but like two-thirds, I would say. And it all boils down to exactly that. You are somehow registered in a system that gives you what these people didn't mean when they said trust anchor, but actually it is. It's your birth certificate. And unfortunately, we don't have that in the majority of the other countries in the world that are not in that realm that we are citizens of.
So, identity management for us, most of the time, looks like this, right? You have a badge, you get a job, then you are forced to log into some systems, and the important part is you have a badge and you have a smartphone. But in order to get these, you probably would have needed to show your identity card. And in order to get that identity card, you would probably have had to show your birth certificate at any point in time at your local civil registry office, right?
So, just to set the scene a bit, in Germany, that is a completely automated process. When you are pregnant and you are about to deliver and you go to the hospital, you will have to show some sort of ID. You will have to identify yourself. And that way, the hospital knows who you are and in which parish you live, under which civil registry office's authority you are actually a citizen. And then the whole process is completely automated.
The only thing is, a few days after birth, when you leave the hospital, you actually have to go to the registry office once, and then you will be handed the birth certificate for your child that has already been prepared for you. So, there is a very, very good, well-organized scheme there that the state has established lots of time ago. And the fun thing for us Germans, the only thing that's really, really unique and sticky and lifelong is our tax ID.
So, upon birth, like a few weeks after my daughter was born in 2011, I received a letter from the tax authorities granting me the tax ID for my daughter. So, yeah, it's like death and taxes and stuff like that.
So, in Germany, this is real good. So, we all assume it's a given, right? Let that sink in. Is it a given, right?
A birth, right? It's not. I've been to places where the majority of children being born these years, these days, do not have a birth certificate, because they are born in very rural areas like Pakistan, which these pictures are taken, and many of the people employed there are day workers. And the amount of money it costs to get a birth certificate for your newborn is more than a day's worth of work.
And, unfortunately, the next registry office might be more than a day's travel away. So, the parent who needs to register the birth of their new child will lose three days of salary. And that is, unfortunately, impossible for them. And don't get me started with, why don't you just go there with a smartphone and do that. They do not have smartphones. They do not have mobile phone reception. That's really, really a problem.
And, again, many of those do not have basic literacy. Why is that?
Oh, well, we'll come to that later. So, switching from Southeast Asia to Sub-Saharan, only half of the children under the age of five have been registered, and six of five do not have a birth certificate. And we in the Western world have a near 100% automated registration. We live in the super future in comparison to these people. It's really, really, really hard. And I got into that line of work like one and a half decades ago, almost, when I was working for the Inter-American Development Bank, IADB, or BID, depending on the language you're working. And they finance projects on that.
And why do they finance it? Well, there is something like the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Who has heard of them? That's not so many.
I really, I beg you, look that up. We, as a society, need to understand that the problems we are solving as the identity management community, unfortunately, only solve the problems of, like, 5% of the population. And the lever that we have as identity management professionals doing just a tiny little contribution to this would be great. So listen up, read up. It's really, really important to understand. So let me introduce you to them. These Sustainable Development Goals state that every child's universal legal identity for all children should be achieved by 2030. Including birth registration.
And ladies and gentlemen, we are far away from that. Far, far, far away from that. And each of these countries with really high growth rates, we all know that in the Western Hemisphere, we have, like, very, very low birth rates. And it's a big problem to sustain our society. But these countries do lack the CRVS for that. Who has heard of that abbreviation acronym? It stands for Civil Registration and Vital Statistics. And it's really, really important because it's the infrastructure that you need to actually register the birth and the death of people. And everything in between.
Especially, of course, issuing birth certificates. So we actually have a United Nations described goal. The foundation of that is the society must first acknowledge the existence of a child being brought to a live birth through a Civil Registration Act. And that is something that we really need to take care of. And please take apologies for that one. But this is really a problem. This is why I'm doing this. This is why I'm standing here. Why is civil registration so relevant?
You know, we see catastrophes in our realms ever more often through global warming because it really exists, Donald. The problem is in these regions, natural disasters struck ever more so often. Especially like in Pakistan and India, we have really severe droughts with temperatures above 45 degrees centigrade for weeks. And that means there's going to be a famine. And then the United Nations says, oh, there's going to be a famine. We need to send aid there.
But if you do not know how many people live in a region that is struck by a drought, how should these planners in Washington know how many tons of wheat and rice and whatever they should send to a certain location? Giving each child a legal identity is the basis for planning how many hospitals I need, how many nurses I need, how many doctors I need, how many teachers I need, how many schools I need to build. And if a state, if a nation does not have that information, they're screwed.
And we're screwed as the people trying to send help because we don't know how many tons of certain things for the basic stuff is needed. And the problem is not like some super-duper, ultra-fancy UID or whatever wallet and business wallets. It's the very basics. Let me give you an example of Madagascar. Just the simple workflow. How do I register the birth of a person? How do I register the death of a person? That's a drawing I created a few years for my friend Mia, who you've seen in the center of the pictures. I was with her in Pakistan and Jamaica and in Ecuador. And it's really the basics.
Just a flowchart and making sure that we know who is responsible. And that responsibility is also a big problem. Taken from my project here in Pakistan. They were fighting over who has the authority to get this done. Who issues these birth certificates and the NADRA thing you see here on the left-hand side. Anyone from Pakistan here? Don't want to offend anyone. But Pakistan, you may or may not know, is more or less run by the military. The military is a really, really strong force in that environment, in that region. And NADRA is a...
Well, you can euphemistically call it a public-private partnership. But it's one between a company and the military. And they try to control that whole thing by selling something that is very close to a birth certificate, but it isn't. So we've been working with UNICEF to make sure that we at least assign the authority to build that infrastructure. In the state, in the province, in the division district, in the parish level. And that is a really, really big issue already. And those are not really super-technological problems to solve.
It's just, if you put your mind to it, it's quite easy. If you've worked in workforce identity, these structures are pretty similar. The ideas you have to follow are pretty similar. And we all know these systems... And just for the record, Pakistan has like 250 million inhabitants. And it's one of the fastest-growing countries in the world, with an average of above three to five children per mother.
So, really big growth. So, why am I standing here? It's a lot of work for you guys to do. I've done my fair bit, and I will get back to that line of business. And it's really not that complicated if you have these basic ideas of a notion of an identity, be it digital or physical. No matter what, you have the idea that it needs processing.
That, of course, in the end, there needs to be a technical infrastructure behind that. So, let me present you with some famous projects, and I'm pretty sure you've heard of them. One is Aadhaar. You probably know that India recently took over China as the world's most populous nation.
And, of course, they have a very wide range between super-duper, well-educated, glitzy development centers in Bangalore and the very rural provinces where the main source of income is agriculture. And really, really like a horse carriage and some sort of water buffalo drawing a carriage.
So, Aadhaar is a very interesting thing because it was built with the idea that if you have to provide an identity for 1.7 billion people and, as a reference, the card in Ecuador costs like $10, only the card plus the infrastructure, that would be a $17 billion project just to acquire the cards. So, they came up with an idea to get this really, really simple card and just give them this 12-digit number. Unfortunately, it's been abused quite a bit because there's graft and people accepting bribes and stuff.
But, hey, it was at least a very, very good approach. Another one, very popular, is MOSIP, the Modular Open Source Identity Platform. And several African states have recently adopted this software. Another one is OpenCRVS with Richard Dufus behind it of Plan International, I think the company is called. They also have a little bit of success, or major success, in deploying that software in the Cook Islands, Somalia, and Madagascar. And there's also hybrid approaches to get both of them into action and leverage the benefits of each of the technologies. But they themselves say, we need scale.
There are so many countries out there who have nothing and it needs to be done. We need education. We need service providers. We need technology providers to collaborate and make stuff interoperable.
And, you know, interoperability, openness, isn't that what Heather has talked about? So, just take that being ambassadors for identity and go on.
So, if you want to read up on that, there is a bunch of links here that you can get the slides, right? It's really easy. And I just want to encourage you to do a little bit of that. And I have, like, two or three more minutes.
So, the organizations that you should look for is IDB, the International Development Bank. In Washington, of course, it's the World Bank. It is UNICEF. And one other organization that I have worked with is the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue. And it will just getting in front of these organizations and making yourself visible gives you the opportunity to go places. And I mean places, just as an idea. I've personally been to Pakistan. I've been to Myanmar and also Thailand, but only on the way through. I've been to Jamaica.
That's where my travel sort of began in 2010, being invited for a three-day workshop and stuff like that. I also had the opportunity to go to Mexico, but my colleague, Dr. Zivia Knittel, some of you may know her. She's with PWC now, I think, took over that one. And I've been to Ecuador multiple times.
And, you know, international travel, they say, is like a new chapter of a book or a new book with every country you go to. You will have things that you will remember. Let me give you an example here. Who knows the guy in the middle with the striped shirt? Has anyone seen that guy? Who's that? That is Felix Gitkins, formerly of Gartner and now with Beyond Trust. And he speaks fluent Spanish. And my Spanish is like, okay, I can understand a lot. This is 2010 when we were in Ecuador. And the guy on the left-hand side is Paulo.
He was the state secretary who ran the identity management project, so the civil identity management project. And these two gentlemen on the left-hand side were indigenous chiefs from the rainforest trying to represent their community.
And also, when you go to certain countries, yes, you will have these nice United Nations cars, the white ones, that are heavily shielded. Because, yes, there are threat actors there. But it's all good. I have my minutes. I can talk about that over an Argenti beer. But it's really mind-opening and eye-opening. So what I want you to do, just get yourself involved. Every little contribution helps. And I just gave you a few links here to follow up. The IADB is always looking for consultants. It's always looking for professional services. It's always looking for people to assist.
The same goes, of course, with the software organizations, OpenCRVS and the MoSib community. And I will strongly recommend looking at the IADB for Africa website. They have wonderful conferences. What's been happening in Africa in the last five, six, seven years is tremendous. They have invested so much, and they have established so many great projects there. So just my plea to you, get that knowledge that you already have and transfer it. Give a little bit, because your impact in that environment will be so much bigger. And you will feel so much better as a human being. I really can say that.
Just going there, helping hand. We've always been welcome as friends. During that time in Pakistan, I went to a local museum. And by the end of my visit, I'm pretty sure everyone who was also a visitor had taken a selfie with me and expressed their gratitude for me as a Westerner being interested in their history and their society. So it is really, really, really heartwarming. You will receive plenty of feedback and all the good ones. So thank you for your attention, and thanks again for Elizabeth for that keynote.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Just one quick thing before we all leave for lunch. Please give us a grade on this track. That helps us understand what content you want to see. And then maybe just one quick question for you. As far as IDPro, is there something specific we can do there?
I mean, there's a body of knowledge that is of immense value. Is there something specific that we can do there?
So, of course, if you had any kind of exposure to civil registration or vital statistics systems, if you have any idea around how a national ID system and its basic flows work and which components are necessary, and also about the scale. Because, like, you know, deploying an identity management system that holds 250 million records with a 10% growth rate per year is a challenge, right? So if you can contribute to that, it's really good. One of the links is a book that I had the honor to co-write from the World Bank and UNICEF on the ICT components necessary for CRVS by Mia Harbert.
There is lots of possibility to contribute to these books, too. Thanks. Sorry. I'm Elizabeth. I'm the executive director of IDPro. I just tagged you on Slack, actually, because last week is so timely. I was in Africa, for ID for Africa, and I was asking the question, how can we, as an IDPro community, do better at connecting these dots in these communities? So I've tagged you, and I'm tagging implicitly all of you to come and join that conversation on the IDPro Slack. Thanks so much. Awesome.
Thanks, everybody. And enjoy your lunch. Enjoy your lunch. See you after.
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