Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here, the first time for us to be at the AIC. And I'm very happy that we're able to show you a bit our very unusual and surprising corner of the world that we work in. And it will at first look a bit odd that I'm going to present issues of identity and access management to you because the first half of the presentation is really about the reality that we face and the second half is then really the segue into what we do with some of you, many of the other partners out there and what the opportunities are. Just a few words about myself. I'm Volker Schimmel.
I've worked for the United Nations in various capacities around the world for over 20 years, mostly in Africa and the Middle East and since 2020 in this role in headquarters. And it's worth mentioning that the UN Refugee Agency is not maybe the most well-known, so a quick few key facts here. We are turning 75 this year, probably the most difficult year in our existence. Regardless, it is the organization that is mandated to oversee and support the Refugee Convention.
We have reached a situation where in a global context of mobility, one in 69 persons globally is displaced, either within their borders or across. We are operational as of this year in 150 countries and this is also the annual budget that we manage that's post-international geopolitical impact. It's important to sort of give you a sense to gauge how far we spread and how diverse our geographic areas are with the knowledge that we also don't appear as the biggest or most important player.
So this is where the element of leverage and partnership comes in and I'm coming back to that at the end of the presentation. So what are we talking about in the last decade or so, 15 years maybe in terms of global trends? Unsurprisingly, and I highlighted a few of the big, most well-known crises, starting with Syria, then Bangladesh, Ukraine, and most recently Sudan up there. And I won't belabor the numbers, the trend is what is important.
And you can overlay on top of that trend the development in this space, in the identity space, in anything to do with cloud, biometrics, wallets, we've heard many of these things today already. And you can, of course, add to that global mobility and these are the areas that we find ourselves in in terms of our work in regards to identity.
Now, in order to build this up from the ground, I want to talk to you a bit about the work and what it looks like on the front line. What's this?
Yeah, sorry. What happens in a situation when a crisis breaks is that we usually come to a scene of confusion, chaos, mayhem, you see some pictures here. This particular one, I was there myself, this is on the border between Syria and Jordan. And you have people crossing while bombs are dropping and it's really a very unique setting where you're just focusing essentially on making sense of the situation and saving lives.
However, that situation is sensitive because in most contexts, we're dealing with a question mark over the identity of the individual. Are they a citizen of the country that they're fleeing from? Are they not? If they are, who are they? Are they potentially a combatant? Are they potentially a terrorist? All of these things are questions that my global team has to grapple with every day. And then add to that any complications around identity and credentials that may be presented. If they exist, I will come to the complexities of that situation in a later slide.
It really is a starting point often of nothing. So what we have to do is what I call the forensic construction or reconstruction of identity. So what often happens is that we deploy teams, set up these centers that you see here. We have teams on the ground that we either have or that we build in order to build identity for each and every person, rebuild the identity for each and every person that we encounter.
And this is a fundamental and foundational element of a broader response in the emergency phase when a lot of organizations then also can benefit from this and government partners and even private sector partners can benefit from this directly. Now, in order to give this a bit of a numeric underpinning, you see the geographic distribution of our work. We have a global identity system and it currently is used for 19 million individuals. Almost 11 million of those are biometrically enrolled and we're operational in still over 150 countries and our database carries over 180 nationalities.
The last figure is probably the most and counterintuitive I should say to digest is that we have 200,000. So this process of continuous registration and ongoing work to manage this is key. This is as of the end of last month.
Now, what does it mean to create this foundational identity? You, of course, know this better than most. It is the on-ramp to subsequent services, access, et cetera, et cetera. Regulatory and legal environment permitting.
Now, here is the key element that makes us slightly different from many other actors, certainly within the refugee space, very different. Because what we issue, and I'm talking about paper documents at this point, are legally recognized documents that we issue on behalf of the governments. Governments ask us to take on their role effectively in these crises, to manage it in a situation where they either cannot or do not want to do it themselves. And at the moment, that's shifting quite significantly, albeit at a slow pace.
But we're seeing still that only 34% of the countries where we operate in is the government issuing IDs directly to refugees. Now, this is the starting point, hopefully a bit of a sense of what we're dealing with on the ground in an initially, certainly hyper-chaotic environment. How does that connect from a document, an element of forensically re-established identity, to a broader identity and access management that fits the many good presentations, ideas, and expertise that we have here in the room and in the conference? We're talking about the refugee identity ecosystem.
What do we already have today? I'm offering here a few examples of what is already in place, where this identity that we manage and use and have effectively created a digital version of is being drawn on for the delivery and provision of services, assistance that any citizen would enjoy in that country, except that often refugees are, of course, not part of the national infrastructure that would permit for that. So to give you a few examples, we've managed to create interoperability, open data solutions with key partners that we're using for food assistance to the tune of six million per month.
We have developed, this was the Jordan experience that I pointed to earlier, I was part of setting up an open data solution with a biometric layer with financial service providers in the region for Syrian refugees that allows for biometrically secured provision of assistance and aid, so combating also elements of diversion of aid and misuse. And very popular, very successful public-private partnership.
We have in the African continent the opportunity to use the identities that we create that are trusted in order to allow for the issuance of SIM cards and to allow access, which is otherwise difficult, to the mobile market. I'll come to that particular challenge in a moment. And last one, it is probably the most sensitive from a government perspective, the most sensitive element, which is when governments accept refugees to relocate to their country, naturalize them, give them citizenship in order to create what we call a durable solution.
These are, of course, processes that are highly, highly valued, highly sought after, and therefore particularly sensitive, including not least when it comes to also law enforcement dimensions. And so we've built over the years many ways of doing that data exchange, that identity exchange with governments from the US, European countries, Australia, and others. But this is an ad hoc way of approaching this, and those are case-by-case solutions. So what are the shifting sands? What are the opportunities that we're really after over the next years?
And I would like to quickly capture that in our 2030 vision. Now, we heard earlier 2026, we heard very short cycles of development, delivery, prototypes.
For us, this has to be at a slower pace because we're talking about a multitude of very, very different countries and geographies and legal and regulatory environments. And we're talking about heavy dependency or codependency also of national systems being stood up and or improved, digital identity systems being rolled out.
Mind you, our biggest footprint is in the global south. And so this 2030 vision might look a bit timid by comparison to what many of you work on. But for us, this is something to take to the world at large in the most difficult contexts. So at the top, you see what we call digital gateway. It's essentially the shift from an in-person engagement, which is 99% of how we interact with refugees globally into a digital space. You can think of it as e-government, as I indicated. Then we are looking at the verifiable credential space.
They are first examples that we have as proof of concept, but they're not really in the right shape. I'll explain that in a moment. And then we have the open data interoperability space that I already highlighted in the previous slide. So what does that mean? It means that the focus really in the years to come is on those two prongs of the 2030 vision. And as I highlighted in the vision as it's set out, it is all about inclusion. We are not a government that can issue legislation or regulation.
We are, by comparison, a small actor if we compare ourselves with other big international organizations, private sectors, and governments themselves, of course. So we have to find ways of creating that sweet spot. And of course, we are working on an area that is usually not really thought of. And often the people who we serve to protect are often not thought of either. And that inclusion means that we're starting with several disadvantages.
Now, what is really the key challenge here? It's the aforementioned operational context, which has so many limitations. We heard a lot of presentations about wallets, about decentralized ID. A lot of it is about the 2040 vision that we started the afternoon with was about the passivity heavily reliant on devices. That is not our reality. So we have to pursue this 2030 vision under adverse circumstances where we are looking at a very low smartphone penetration, certainly not a unique person to device connection. Often smartphones are shared.
They're shared amongst extended families, amongst communities. Then we have the issue of connectivity. Still to this day, even though it's slightly improving, refugees are less likely to, by about 50%, to get connectivity that they can use for the kind of solutions that we would like to offer and that are presented in many of the panels this week. And that's tightly connected to the third point, which is the access to SIM cards.
Because often regulation forbids the lack of, the very lack, ironically, of KYC, of the ability to identify yourself with proper documentation, means that SIM cards are not an option for refugees, which then leads to some sort of prepaid solution or I pay my neighbor who is a citizen of the country to get a SIM card for me. So that entire idea of structure, of identity and reliability is hampered from the start. And lastly, we see here that only in just over half of the countries, there are strides have been made for this regulatory inclusion.
And this is why we're also working parallel on that strain. And you see in the background also the diversity of the settings that we work in that I hope highlights a bit the challenges that we experience in the operational setting. Let me spend the remaining minutes here to highlight a bit more concretely what we're talking about, specifically regarding the digital gateway, our e-government solution, and more importantly, the refugee credential.
So here, we're talking about something that must seem incredibly basic to you and is incredibly difficult to introduce to a cross border multimillion international constituent who lacks digital capabilities and often also literacy. So we are totally hampered by the word I just outlined, but we see the tremendous advantage and we've tested it successfully in five countries so far, the tremendous advantage of making that step.
The big fear, again, bear in mind our position, our limited capabilities is on the overall security side because it is clear that we have the two challenges of on the one hand fraud and on the other hand, activities that are targeting individual refugees. I've worked in countries where the secret service from the country where people are fled from came after individuals and by knowing who they were, where they were, we're able to actually target them and in many cases, assassinate them. So there's really serious issues at play that we need to be doubly careful about.
Our vision is that in the next three, four years, we will be able to shift 30% of all of this to the digital realm. But of course, in this context, it is hugely challenging to make sure that we mitigate the risk appropriately with the operational context constraints.
Lastly, and this is really where also I see the most connections to many of the other presentations and a lot of the exciting engagements around the rooms here is the credentials piece. And we have already a proof of concept in the analog, semi-analog way. We introduced that in Malaysia. It's a very unassuming card with a QR code on the back and it is basically a first way of introducing a quasi-PKI. A quasi-PKI.
Now, the big problem here is that these things were built out of necessity to solve a problem on the ground. In this case, for example, it is so that the Malaysian police can recognize a document, trust us, and therefore honor the agreement we have with the government and not put people into prison or throw them back to wherever they came from.
So this, however, has to be scaled. So what are we looking for when it comes to scaling? We're looking for standards, we're looking for opportunities in the space where governments are moving into this area, whether it's digital identity or national wallet or infrastructures that are similar to those. This is exactly where we want to be. And you see a somewhat adjusted but pretty typical version of what you see in the credential space with the three parties here. And we have a key leg up to offer here.
I give you the example of Ethiopia where we recently implemented the use of our identity for the National Identity Service to draw on said identity in order to then issue a national identity card. So these are the kind of steps that we want to undertake over the coming years. There's exciting developments out there. And if we take a 2030 and 2040 perspective, this will certainly become ubiquitous and we want to make sure that there is inclusion of the populations that we care about. Ultimately, and that's the last line and the end of the presentation, the ambition is the wallet.
And this is where we are looking very much also to what is being discussed here or the equivalent digital representation, functionally equivalent of a wallet. And that is where we have to certainly look beyond the next four years until we've done our critical mass on the first phase. But we are very excited to be part of this community and take in inspiration, ideas, and connect with a lot of you. Thanks so much for listening to our very odd story. And I look forward to meeting some of you around the conference. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule and for including the EIC as a part of your schedule in your year. Rather than asking you any questions, I'd just like to give you the opportunity. What is your call to action for this audience? And how can they kind of come to help in your incredibly important work?
Well, that's awfully kind. For us, the biggest challenge is really that we are, this is not our core business. Our core business is the hands-on work, the liaison with governments, the legal piece. So we need strong partners and we need strong partners who are willing to work with us on standards that can then also be used by others. So we're looking at ecosystems. We're looking at growing partnerships that can leverage that ecosystem, ultimately in order to drive inclusion of refugees in systems and opportunities.
Great, thanks. So please, if you want to partner with Forker, you know where he is. He'll be here for the next couple of hours. So please seek him out and lend him your expertise. Another round of applause for Forker Schimmel. Wonderful. Thank you.
