The Registration Exchange

Know them better to serve them better - identifying the world's most vulnerable through the open registration platform.

The 1 billion un-identified individuals belong to the most vulnerable populations of the world.  One strategy to reach these individuals is to empower those that work with them to provide social services such as civil-society, humanitarian agencies and local government units with local tools that can be used to identify those in need.

The Registration Exchange is a community of practice dedicated to the formation of an open source registration application that can be used by any community members to identify vulnerable individuals.  This application transfers the persons' identity data to any registration and service delivery platform, and enforces privacy controls, operationalizes technical standards, and enables empowerment, dignity and inclusion through identification. Empowerment starts with the individual and thus it only makes sense that we enable their privacy and user empowerment at the start of their data journey. 

While many development and humanitarian organizations have registration systems and applications, they are consistently built from the perspective of effectiveness for the organization, not effectiveness for the person. Frequently people need to provide their identity information multiple times, in multiple forms for multiple entities, with no control over what data they provide or how this data is stored, processed, and shared by the entity. There are many informal networks in existence, principles that have been defined, and technical standards that are being developed, but there is an immense operational gap that needs to be closed if we are to provide individuals with the power to verify and control their identity.

The Registration Exchange will be dedicated to developing an open source registration application and an associated registration platform, backed by a consortium of organizations and/or governments that regularly share identity information.  It will be composed of an open-source registration application intended for use by individuals to self-register for social programs, and by NGOs to enroll people that they wish to serve for any type of assistance.   The open-source application can be technically extended by the NGO community to create tools that fit their context.   

The Registration Exchange will foster the development of an ecosystem of humanitarian service providers that share the highest levels of personal data protection, which includes providing individuals the ability to provide informed consent, see data held by assistance and identity providers, verify how their personal data is accessed and used, see account movements and transactions and provide authorization to allow assistance and identity providers to use their data.  The Registration Exchange will utilize a protection-centric data exchange or access protocol among relevant parties, ensuring that exchange of personal data is minimized, and that each access is for a specific purpose agreed by the owner of the data.  

The World Food Programme, as one of the world's largest humanitarian agencies, has already digitally identified more than 35 million of the worlds' most vulnerable people, and is committed to identifying 124 million of the people that it serves.  This effort can be complemented by the Registration Exchange to create an enabling but protected platform for others to assist more individuals.

Many technologies and standards have been created to capture people's identities.  These developments are necessary but not sufficient.  An exchange platform or identity hub that uses these technologies and standards is needed, one that is compelled by the necessity of humanitarian and development agencies to serve their constituent populations.  The WFP and the World Bank, through jointly embarking on this platform, can serve as key catalysts in linking individuals to assistance and service delivery providers. 

The Registration Exchange will be human-centric by design, and will set up the ecosystem of roles that defines a robust federated identity system.  The Exchange is NOT a self-sovereign identity concept, though it may use self-service tools to allow users to interact with platform services.  Rather, the Registration Exchange will institutionalize identity registrar, identity verifier, identity processor, identity vault provider, and other relevant roles, as it is only through these roles that identity data can be linked to national systems, assured and ultimately protected. 

The Registration Exchange will feature open interfaces to current identity standards.  It will serve as a virtual directory service that can be linked to any mainstream identity system, and fill feature an attribute-based access control approach to allow contextual, dynamic access using attributes or claims from multiple information systems.   It will be extensible, allowing development of adapters or plug-ins for national-level or sector-level identity systems, as well as global-level systems based on social networks.  Through agreed standards it can interface with the worlds' most popular biometric systems. 

The Registration Exchange can be have open interfaces and can be used as an alternative login to leading social network platforms much in the same manner that OpenID used.  But beyond user friendliness, the Registration Exchange will ensure that national level considerations such as national hosting, government access and local autonomy are part of systems design to ensure that the Exchange can ultimately be part of a growing national identity landscape, even as it catalyzes creation of a national identity platform in those countries that have none.  

The Registration Exchange will conform to ISO standards, as well as defacto established standards, such as OpenID, for systems inter-operability. It will provide APIs that are open and scalable, and will be implemented to the extent possible using vendor-agnostic or open-source components.

The identity functions will be accessible through curated or self-service approaches.  From our experience of registering more than 35 million individuals, a curated registration scenario with appropriate sensitization and communications, and synchronizing in batch at each day's end works well for limited connectivity and low literacy populations.  Self-service options can use mobile or USSD front-ends in a store-and-forward architecture that works well in fragile environments.

Our current solution, SCOPE, already impacts more than 35 million individuals.  WFP wishes to provide open interfaces and re-architect SCOPE to become one of the basis for The Registration Exchange, and rapidly increase adoption across WFP's humanitarian caseload of 124 million people.  By extending the use for SCOPE to other development and humanitarian agencies, we hope this will enable others to support the 124 million that WFP serves, as well as address the needs of all others beyond the 124 million. 

We are working with more than 1000 NGOs in the world, and more than 100 of these are using SCOPE for registering the people that WFP serves together with them.  We are also working with IOM, UNHCR, UNICEF and World Vision International to protect and exchange beneficiary personal data.

Our team is composed of data privacy and risk, business development, software engineering, enterprise architecture and operations management professionals.

Our project is donor-funded today.  We have seen double-digit efficiencies that better identity management brings, in terms of savings gained through population levels reduced to the correct size through rigorous enforcement of unique identities as well as correct household sizes, as well as efficiencies gained through correct targeting of assistance to individuals according to their personal characteristics.   We envisage that in the long term these efficiencies can be better documented and a per-identity charging or funding model created to be shared by each assistance provider.

We are applying to the Challenge in order to publicize our work, as well as to take steps in opening up our solution so it can be used by more people and more agencies.  By doing so, it will make our work to address the food needs of 124 million people easier.   It is said that to go fast you must go alone, but to go far you need to be with others.

Our solution is showing signs of success.  It has 35 million identities being used for WFP's assistance.  It is currently being envisaged to be used as the platform for identities of at least two national-level social protection programs.  We need to partner with as many like-minded organizations as possible to extend the use of the tool, and to ensure that it integrates as part of a structured ecosystem component with the tools of others.