If a person cannot prove who they are, can they take advantage of all of the opportunities society has to offer?

For the 850 million people around the world who lack any acceptable form of legal identity, the answer is no. Identity verification enables people to fully participate in the economy. It eases access to employment and education as well as services such as banking, government programs, and health care.

People living in low- and middle-income countries are more likely to go without personal details. More than half of those without proof of identity are children whose births were not registered. One in two women in low-income countries do not have ID. And even among those whose identity can be verified, many lack documentation that is suited to the digital age.

This means many of the resources that could help them improve their quality of life are out of reach. Enter the digital ID.

Fortunately, a formidable solution has emerged: an open-source, customizable digital identity solution called Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) that is available to all countries for free.

A small but mighty team in India developed this technology for creating national digital ID systems, with funding from our foundation. Since 2018, 11 countries, nine of them in Africa and two in Asia, have signed memoranda of understanding with MOSIP to pilot the system. More than 90 million people have been registered for MOSIP-based IDs in the Philippines, Ethiopia, and Morocco as part of national deployments. MOSIP is a powerful example of how low- and middle-income countries can harness open-source technology to improve lives and accelerate development.

Digital ID is a critical piece of digital public infrastructure 

Digital ID systems are one of the three pillars of what’s known as digital public infrastructure (DPI); the others are digital payment systems and data exchange systems. By connecting people and making it easier to move money and share information, DPI is in many ways the modern-day equivalent of the roads and bridges that helped reshape economies in the 19th century. Researchers say that DPI can help low- and middle-income countries leapfrog traditional stages of development, lift millions out of poverty, and spur economic growth.

A digital ID system is critical because people need a verified national identity in order to tap into DPI’s other benefits, from digital bank accounts and instant payments to mobile phone accounts and personal data management.

The original inspiration for MOSIP was India’s national digital ID system, Aadhaar, which launched in 2009. This ambitious effort would eventually enroll over 99% of all Indian adults.

S Rajagopalan, a professor at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-Bangalore), was sure that Aadhaar would be transformational. In the early 1990s, he had worked on technology for people living in poverty in rural areas of India. He saw that access to public services was a recurring problem because the villagers didn’t have IDs. They needed an intermediary to vouch for them when they went to a hospital, for example, or when they wanted to access subsidized rations like wheat, pulses, or sugar. This issue especially affected women living in poverty.

True to Rajagopalan’s prediction, Aadhaar transformed life for people across India. Access to an inclusive digital ID system meant that people no longer had to rely on intermediaries. The system also made life easier in other important ways. Within a decade, bank account ownership in India more than doubled, to 78% in 2021, and brought millions of Indians, especially women, into the formal economy. This achievement would otherwise have taken 45 years. The system has broadened the reach of social safety net programs, reduced waste, and made the government more responsive during times of crisis.

Rajagopalan and a team of programmers at IIIT-Bangalore wanted the benefits of a system like Aadhaar to reach a global audience. So they set out to build MOSIP—a flexible, inclusive, and trusted digital ID system that any country could customize to meet its specific needs.

MOSIP alone does not do it all – for the system to be fully functional, governments also need biometric device vendors, deduplication software providers, card or credential printing machines, and system integrators, all of which require additional investment. If a digital ID system is a car, MOSIP is the engine, and these ancillary items are the wheels, seats, steering, and lights.

So the MOSIP team made it easier for governments to build the car. MOSIP developed a thriving ecosystem of more than 80 commercial vendors to provide those ancillary services so that adopting governments had choices. More competition helps keep prices low, so MOSIP provides free training to commercial partners, local and international alike, and created a marketplace where partners could showcase products and services to governments. MOSIP also oversees an independent certification process for commercial partners, ensuring small and large players could compete.

By 2021, six countries had adopted the MOSIP system, three times more than the team had expected. Success stories flooded into MOSIP’s offices at IIIT-Bangalore. In one African country, 550,000 students started receiving government benefits after the MOSIP team wrote a tool that imported their existing biometric data from the education department into the ID system. In one Asian nation, the government issued bank account numbers when people registered for the country’s ID system, resulting in 8 million bank account applications.

Success was not inevitable. MOSIP’s biggest challenge was meeting demand. Morocco signed up before the MOSIP programmers had written a single line of code, and others eagerly lined up. Many nations wanted to expedite their adoption after the COVID-19 pandemic exposed huge systemic vulnerabilities, including governments’ inability to identify who needed help and how to quickly send them aid.

Then there was the anxiety the team felt, on a deeper existential level, about what it would mean for the future of digital ID systems if MOSIP failed. They worried that it would stymie future development. “It was a situation that gave us a lot of pause,” said Arun Gurumurthy, MOSIP’s head of strategy and resourcing.

There was good reason for their nerves. No one had ever attempted to build a system like MOSIP, which sought to register the entire population of a country regardless of its size, geography, or cultural characteristics. The system had to be flexible enough to accommodate a country as small as 5 million people and as large as 100 million or more people. It had to be able to enroll a population spread across 7,500 islands, as in the Philippines, or across mountains and deserts, as in Morocco. With every country adoption, the team encountered new challenges. And it had to be secure, as it managed peoples’ sensitive data, including contact details, digital signatures, and biometric identifiers.

But the MOSIP team had one big advantage: Because they were based at a university, their decisions weren’t driven by business objectives. This allowed them to make inclusivity, digital privacy, and user feedback high priorities. They engaged in research collaborations with global institutes like the Alan Turing Institute and Carnegie Mellon University, with the aim of co-creating state-of-the-art technologies incorporating security and user privacy as key design principles. They built an international advisory group of experts in identity that brought a global perspective to how the technology is designed, developed and disseminated.

Together, they anticipated challenges, sought feedback from the field, and modified the software in response.

The Philippines was MOSIP’s first large-scale deployment. The country had spotty internet connectivity in remote places, so MOSIP worked with vendors to engineer special field kits that let enrollment officers travel door-to-door to collect people’s information and then upload the data into the system in batches later, when they had connectivity. MOSIP also made the digital identity credential a digitally signed QR code so it could be verified offline—a feature that is now standard in the system.

In Africa, where almost two-thirds of people still use feature phones, the MOSIP engineers had to figure out how to enable authentication despite the limited functionality of the devices. They also sped up pilot testing, which initially took so long that governments would sometimes change before they finished. The team retooled the model to shrink the pilot period from 18 months to three months. To make the pilot implementation more affordable for countries, MOSIP supplied biometric identifier devices and other elements of the pilot so countries only had to spend a few thousand dollars to collect digital forms of identification. Within four months of a successful trial in Togo, four other countries signed up to run pilots.

To maximize inclusivity, the team gave people several options for sharing their biometric data to create their digital identities, including scans of their fingerprints, iris, or face. This was helpful in places like Ethiopia, where few people had ever had their fingerprints scanned. One day, an elderly man at a registration center talked excitedly about how his new ID would enable him to access services without having to give a cut to a middleman. But as he placed his fingers on the scanner, his hands shook so much that the machine was unable to get a clear scan. The man worried that he would not be able to get his ID. The dozens of other people in line—mothers holding children, other elderly people—looked on, wondering if they, too, would encounter the same problem.

The operators switched to an iris scanner, which worked. “The gentleman was very happy,” said Krishnan Rajagopalan, MOSIP’s head of country implementation, who was visiting the registration site that day.

MOSIP illustrates how digital technologies can be harnessed for good on a massive scale. The MOSIP team hopes that the system will register 1 billion people over the next decade, while they work on ways to integrate it with other systems to make life easier for people.

Every year on February 14, which the team has dubbed “MOSIP Open Source Day,” they celebrate their latest accomplishments and, above all, the millions more people who are benefiting from the system.

The team feels “a sense of satisfaction on the one hand, but it also shows us that we have billions more to cover out there,” says Ramesh Narayanan, MOSIP’s chief technology officer. “And that drives us.”