Youverify : Empowering Africans with Identity

Youverify is building out a digital identity infrastructure that helps businesses verify identity and addresses of Africans. 

Over 500m people in Africa do not have an official identity and a proof of address thereby limiting their social-economically participation in the society. Two reasons why this problem has refused to go away are, firstly the cost of acquiring identification in developing countries especially when they are no sustainable approach of funding the identity acquisition and secondly, the perceived lack of value in identification by the populace outside for election registration. Youverify wants to solve the problem by building out a digital identity infrastructure that generates revenue for the identity authorities to scale their enrolment program and empower the populace with their identity to secure jobs, access government services, protect their reputation, and drive trade. We achieve this by creating an ecosystem of partners and a secured technology platform that help us to aggregate all existing official government identities and digital addresses which we make available to the corresponding individual via blockchain for verification, new enrolment and secured sharing.  Our partners get paid for each verification lookup on their database and businesses pay us for each shared or verified identity or address, while the individual in question has full control on who has access to their data.

Our solution helps identity authorities to generate revenue from their existing data set and empower them with funds and technology to scale out their enrolment program. Since we launched we have created 1500 new jobs in Nigeria and empower 250,000 with their identities to trade, access government services and change jobs. 

Our innovation comes from the way we have applied existing technologies and our business model to solving the challenge by increasing access to funds for identity agencies and empowerment of the citizenry. The technologies we are using are not new but our application and business model are new in this part of the world. 

For example; At the core of our platform is the vForm service which allows businesses and individuals to verify 3rd party business and individuals by sending them SMS or email. The target 3rd party business or individual only needs to reply with a unique identification number and answer a secret question, after which we confirm to the identity of the individual or business and share any information the target individual consented to. By design we do not make a copy of the government data set but access it via secured API on demand and tokenised the response on our platform

By designed, all data is encrypted and salted by credentials know to the source of the data. Our solution is a digital identification system because we use our services to power single sign-ons, enrolment, customer on-boarding and consented data exchanges seamlessly without actually exchanging raw personal data. 

Users can use 4 different mediums to engage; Web Portal, Mobile App, Mobile SMS and API. Mobile SMS gives us an opportunity to reach the less privileged in the community. They can consent and share any of their personal information via SMS or USSD easily and the verification requester will receive only what the individual allowed us to share or a boolean response of the status of the individual i.e. Driver's License Active for John Doe (08021234567) and due to expire on 10/10/2023. On the mobile app, individuals can enrol once and use the enrolment on other government ID programs. 

We presently have APIs for integration to the platform which is only opened to verified and approved business partners or government agencies. 

We account for this with our verification via SMS/USSD option in our vForm Service where the users only need to send SMS or use USSD to use the platform.

Our vision is to empower 500m people in Africa with their identity and their address information by creating the most robust and largest digital identity platform and infrastructure in Sub-saharan Africa.

We are working with a combination of government and private institutions as partners in our ecosystem to execute our model;

National Identity Management Commission (NIMC)

Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC)

National Communication Commission (NCC)

Nigerian Postal Service (NIPOST)

Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC)

Nigeria Immigration Service

La Poste de Cote d'Ivoire

Association of Nigeria Courier companies (ANCO)

I have more than 15 years experience building enterprise solutions for corporations across Africa, which gave me the opportunity to develop and commercialise some of the most successful digital products in our market. Overall our team has extensive experience over many years in partnership development, product development, software development, sales management, ecosystem management and social impact investment. This has allowed us attract investment from Village Capital (Social Impact investor in USA), Chinook Capital (Social Impact investor in Nigeria), Pan Africa Postal Union (Specialised body that administer all postal operators in Africa), and the over 5 different governments in Africa.

Our business model is a transaction-based software as a service (SaaS) model, where we charge our business customers for every verification or enrolment or customer on-boarding. Our charge is dependent on the type of verification selected by the business customer i.e. employment pre-screening, SIM registration, field on-boarding, account opening, driver background check, business due diligence etc. Our cost for each transaction is mainly our API access cost to the government agencies who are the custodian of the data set we use or our data acquisition partners. Presently, we have access to over 100 data sets over 50 countries and we are fully operational in Nigeria but we plan to scale our operations to 5 other African countries in 2019. 

We see two strategic benefits from our participation in the Mission Billion Challenge. Firstly, validation of our approach by global leaders in the industry and secondly, potential to widen and accelerate our ecosystem and partnership. The two benefits ultimately accelerates us to our goal of empowering Africans with identity.

The biggest effort required for our solution is ecosystem and partnership building. Most of our strategic partners are government agencies in developing countries and we require access to showcase how we can help them scale their identity programs and empower their citizenry without compromising their data. Partnership with organisations that has the political capital and reputation helps us overcome this challenge significantly as we have experienced in Nigeria.