MoU between Government of Morocco and IIIT-B
Press Release 29 August 2018
August 27, 2018 | Rabat, Morocco
The International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIIT-B), a world-renowned technology university, as part of its efforts in promoting open source applications for societal development, is undertaking a global effort to create a Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) as a public good.
As countries consider how best to build foundational identity systems, they face several policy and technological choices, and associated implementation challenges. Countries often struggle with ensuring uniqueness in the system, interoperability, maintain security, privacy by design, reaching scale, avoiding vendor lock-in, maintaining affordability, and so on. MOSIP will augment governments’ capacity to address some of these common challenges. MOSIP will be configurable and customizable, enabling countries to make choices based on specific requirements for their foundational ID system.
MOSIP is a modular and open source identity platform that hopes to help countries implement a foundational digital identity in a cost-effective manner. It is being built on the principles of scalability, security and privacy. It will be freely available to countries. The use of open standards and open source ensures that MOSIP is agnostic to specific applications, programming languages and platforms. The modular architecture provides governments flexibility in how they implement their foundational identity system.
MOSIP is being developed in keeping with the ethos of the open source movement. Its development and evolution will be governed by a combination of a) an executive committe comprising donors and representatives of organizations that have been championing digital identity for sustainable and inclusive development, and b) a technology committee - comprising of experts in the fields of open source software development, software engineering, architecture, quality assurance, security, privacy, and biometrics - that will be the authority on approving architecture, design, code and documentation for MOSIP.
The Government of Morocco, Ministry of interior (MOI/GOM) have decided to implement the National Population Register (RNP) that will be a database of citizens and foreign residents of Morocco. Each individual in the register will be unique and will be assigned a unique Personal Identification Number (PIN) based on her demographic data and biometric data. With the RNP program, the MOI/GOM intends to improve targeting and data exchange with available Social Safety Net (SSN) programs.
The objective is to create the system which can serve as a backbone for delivering services to citizens and foreign residents of Morocco under government programs using an authentication mechanism. The enhancement of identity and targeting systems will particularly benefit women by facilitating their access to social and financial services. IIIT Bangalore, India has agreed to provide MOSIP application suite, along with relevant documentation and support, to MOI/GOM which shall form a part of the RNP Information System. A Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the organisations on 27th August 2018 to outline the modalities of this arrangement and formalize our collaboration.