MOSIP presents at UNHCR’s Summit on Digital ID for Refugees
30-05-2019
MOSIP participated in the ‘Global Virtual Summit on Digital Identity for Refugees’ organised by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) held on May 29, 2019. UNHCR, in partnership with Immigration, Refugees, Citizenship Canada, launched this Global Summit to harness the experiences, perspectives and expertise of a diverse and inclusive group of stakeholders in considering how digital identity can facilitate greater empowerment, protection and solutions for asylum seekers and refugees. Together they aim to encourage a wider conversation in this area among forcibly displaced persons, host communities, the private sector, academia, humanitarian and development actors.
We presented our views on inclusive design solutions for interoperable, standards-based digital identity systems. MOSIP put forward its approach to foundational identity, which aims to develop an open source, modular platform providing the critical building blocks for user agencies to develop and own their identity systems. The recordings for these sessions are available here.
MOSIP allows for customization and configuration as per user needs. It has the capability to work both in online and offline mode, has a modularized credential management system, enables user-controlled privacy, and is capable of inter-operating with both existing and new solutions. It allows the user agencies like UNHCR to adopt a layered approach where they can govern the critical function of identity and authentication management while collaborating with specialized service providers to operate on top of the foundational layer.
In the run-up to the event, we also submitted a paper to the UNHCR establishing an approach for a platform like MOSIP to form the basis of a standards-based identity system for refugees. This paper was accepted and will be made available on the UNHCR website.
We believe MOSIP could serve as a reliable next-generation platform for UNHCR fulfil the critical function of building and managing their identity ecosystem and assist in their mandate of providing international protection and humanitarian assistance.