Two closely related challenges continue to shape how countries adopt digital identity infrastructure: contextual mismatch and technological dependence. When systems are designed for one context and deployed in another, they often carry assumptions that do not readily translate across geographies. Having to adapt them to local institutions and governance models can leave governments reliant on the technology developers, making long-term ownership and sustainability harder to achieve.
Built as a Digital Public Good (DPG), MOSIP was established to help address this challenge. From our earliest country engagements, beginning with Morocco, it was clear that technology transfer alone could not create long-term sustainability. Countries needed to be active partners in shaping and evolving the digital infrastructure they adopted.
For us, this has always meant building with the countries we partner with. Through collaborative development, country and MOSIP teams work side by side to design new capabilities and extend existing functionality of the platform, ensuring that new capabilities are grounded in real implementation needs.
And because the MOSIP platform is open source, improvements developed through one country's experience become part of the shared codebase, allowing future implementers to benefit from solutions that have already been tested and refined. This way, every implementation leaves the platform a little better than it found it, creating value for the countries that come after.
Traditional capacity-building models in digital development can tend to follow a linear path: training, knowledge transfer, and implementation support. While they are integral, these approaches leave governments as adopters of technology rather than active contributors.
MOSIP's co-creation approach builds on this understanding by advocating for participatory digital infrastructure development, and integrates three complementary objectives.
Capacity Building for Co-Creation: Governments acquire hands-on technical skills by contributing directly to code, testing, and deployment, while working alongside the MOSIP Community and gaining a deeper understanding of the platform's architecture and processes.
Localised Innovation: Local needs and priorities inform the development of new modules, features, and integrations, ensuring the platform remains relevant and adaptable.
Open-Source Contribution: All independent and co-created components are integrated back into MOSIP’s open-source core, benefiting the global community.
This collaborative process creates a functional cycle. Countries strengthen their technical capabilities while contributing ideas and innovations drawn from real implementation experience. MOSIP, in turn, continues to maintain and evolve the core platform, integrating contributions that strengthen the platform as a whole.
Ethiopia’s collaboration with MOSIP exemplifies co-creation in addressing infrastructural and inclusion challenges. As the country expanded national ID enrolment into rural and remote communities, there was a requirement for registration teams to carry a tablet into areas where travelling to an enrolment centre was difficult due to distance, cost, or local sensitivities.
Supporting these field deployments required a Registration Client with the same capabilities as its desktop counterpart, but optimised for Android tablets used in the field.
While an Android Registration Client (ARC) was already part of MOSIP's roadmap, Ethiopia's implementation needed accelerated development, and as a result, helped shape the design of a mobile registration client capable of functioning on Android tablets.
Working together, Ethiopia's engineers brought valuable expertise in building resource-efficient Android applications, sharing best practices that led to significant improvements in power consumption and resource utilisation. These insights strengthened the Android codebase, helping ensure reliable performance during long hours of door-to-door registration.
The resulting ARC combines full registration functionality with the mobility needed for remote enrolment. And because those improvements became part of MOSIP's open-source platform, the lessons learned in Ethiopia are now available to every country adopting MOSIP. This demonstrates how co-creation not only produces localised innovation but also amplifies global value through open access.
Cambodia's collaboration with MOSIP focused on strengthening the country's digital authentication system. While Cambodia already had their national ID system in place, they were looking for a more scalable way for relying parties to authenticate users. Rather than requiring each service to build and maintain its own integration with the national ID platform, the goal was to establish a common authentication layer through eSignet.
During early discussions, the Cambodia team identified an important requirement. Different services demanded different levels of assurance depending on the sensitivity of the transaction, requiring stronger authentication for high-assurance use cases while allowing simpler user journeys where appropriate. At the time, this capability did not yet exist within eSignet.
Over 6 months, engineers from the Cambodia and MOSIP teams worked side by side to define requirements, shape the architecture, and develop the capability from the ground up. The outcome was the Unified Login Portal, introducing support for differentiated authentication journeys and laying the foundation for levels of assurance within eSignet.
While Cambodia's implementation priorities later evolved before the feature was adopted nationally, the work itself became part of MOSIP's core eSignet offering. Incorporated into a subsequent product release, the Unified Login Portal is now available to every country adopting eSignet.
The co-creation model demonstrates multiple layers of impact across technical, institutional, and systemic dimensions.
By participating directly in system architecture and learning within active development cycles, government engineers acquire practical expertise in modular architecture, open-source contribution, and DevOps processes. This experiential model surpasses conventional capacity-building programs in effectiveness and retention.
Co-creation ensures that national teams maintain full technical understanding and operational control of the systems they deploy. This mitigates dependency on external vendors and strengthens local institutions’ ability to manage and evolve their digital ID ecosystems.
Open collaboration creates a different model for innovation. Rather than solving similar challenges repeatedly in isolation, countries can build on one another's experience, adapting and refining solutions that have already been tested in practice. This reduces the duplication of effort and allows the platform to evolve in ways that reflect a broader range of implementation contexts.
One of the defining strengths of an open-source DPG is that every implementation can strengthen the next. Every co-created output is released under open-source licensing, ensuring transparency, interoperability, and accessibility. This reinforces the DPG ethos central to MOSIP’s mission and contributes to collective progress in digital identity technology.
The experiences of Ethiopia and Cambodia showcase what becomes possible when countries help shape the technology they implement.
Today with 30 country engagements across the globe, co-creation has grown into a shared practice shaped by the experiences of governments, engineers, and partners across our ecosystem. Each implementation has contributed something new, strengthening the platform and the wider open-source ecosystem.
As the DPI landscape continues to mature, so too does the collective knowledge of the community building it. Every partnership, challenge, and solution adds to a growing body of experience that others can draw from, helping countries build on what has come before while contributing something of their own.
