Why We Wrote This Report

Though we live in a world that is increasingly digital, the benefits of the tech revolution have not been evenly shared. In the words of science fiction author William Gibson, “the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”¹ Policymakers and international development professionals must take this as a challenge. Ensuring that the positive impact of emerging technology is extended to the less fortunate is a daunting task, and it is not always obvious where to begin. But sometimes it is. Digital identity is one such case.

Identity is widely recognized as both a crucial tool and a pressing need in international development. When the Sustainable Development Goals were announced in September 2015, Goal 16.9 explicitly targeted “providing legal identity for all” by 2030.² The development community has recognized that connecting people efficiently and securely to essential services requires a robust identity solution. As systems and services increasingly become digitized, so must identity. Already, the Identification For Development (ID4D) initiative at the World Bank is funding a set of initiatives in more than 20 developing countries to improve digital identity systems.³

But what is the optimal approach to digital identity? Digital identity platforms offer efficiency, transparency, convenience, and inclusion. Of course, if designed poorly, they can also create or exacerbate privacy and data security challenges. The dangers of centralized and insecure storage of personal data have been well illustrated by recent events—notably the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal,⁴ the Equifax data breach,⁵ the ongoing challenges facing the Aadhaar system in India,⁶ and the most recent Facebook hack.⁷

Alan Gelb and Anna Diofasi Metz of the Center for Global Development published Identification Revolution: Can Digital ID Be Harnessed for Development?⁸ in January 2018. They review the case for digital identity, highlight the increasing importance in developing economies and examine current case studies such as Aadhar. They “conclude that digital ID has the power to do both tremendous good and to inflict serious harm depending on how it is used.”⁹ We agree completely and do not intend to repeat nor review their exceptional work here. Instead, we look to the next evolutionary stage of digital identity, which we believe is self-sovereign identity. We expect that SSI will be widely adopted in the coming years as it addresses the shortcomings of centralized identity systems.

The report has two sections. The first section is relatively non-technical and accessible: we describe SSI and its advantages; we discuss registries, broadly highlighting their role in society; and, we look at four areas in which we believe SSI can have a positive impact on land administration.

The second section assumes that the first section has succeeded in arousing the uninitiated reader’s curiosity about SSI. The curious reader must also be patient; our attempts at brevity resulted in an unacceptable density of jargon and so were abandoned. The second section has three parts: We review ten broad principles of SSI that have been in use for some time; we describe three emerging solutions from Everest, Evernym, and uPort, companies that have invested in SSI and should be taken seriously; and, we look at each firm through the lens of the set of ten principles previously described. This analysis does not imply our endorsement of these three. There are many companies competing in this rapidly growing space. Instead, by exploring three solutions which are both influential and markedly different along various axes, we hope to make clear to the reader the breadth of what is possible and the options they can explore.

Disclaimer: The week of final edits on this paper was punctuated, almost daily, by the release of a major publication about digital identity and/or SSI. This paper is neither definitive nor exhaustive. Instead, we intend it to be a useful tool for policy makers to learn about an emerging technology we see as inevitable. The only thing of which we can be certain is that by the time we send it to print, parts of it will have become outdated. This is a frustration familiar to anyone who analyzes emerging technology. Our hope is that even though our citations and examples may age quickly, some of the work here will be useful and stand the test of time.