Self-Sovereign ID for Refugees

Problem

Migrants and refugees seek self-reliance. Two key barriers to self-reliance occur due to weak digital ID and communications between refugees and refugee services.

• Migrants and refugees rely on fragmented and potentially unreliable communication channels to connect with agencies & NGOs and hear about information, services and job opportunities that could improve their wellbeing and prospects.
• NGOs struggle to refer, connect and communicate with refugees regarding opportunities for self-reliance.

Solution

ZAKA offers a self-sovereign ID wallet, the “ZAKA App”, that isprivate-by-design and contains two key functions:

• Refugees can receive, hold and use verifiable digital ID credentials that are portable and owned by them.
• Built-in messaging functionality for refugees to receive relevant, targeted and timely information from agencies and NGOs about key services that may benefit them or their family.

Impact

The solution, now being tested with UNDP and others Turkey, could be easily replicated to other refugee contexts.

It is estimated that around 4.5m refugees reside in Turkey. There is growing pressure for refugees to become self-reliant, including transitioning away from the Emergency Social Safety Net and into employment. One issue preventing this is the availability of reliable data about migrants and refugees. ZAKA finds that the international community and local NGOs rely on limited, siloed and often outdated datasets for programming and beneficiary outreach. 

Aside from the lack of verifiable credentials available to refugees for proving their ID over digital channels, this information inefficiency results in two problems:

1. Migrants and refugees rely on fragmented and potentially unreliable communication channels to hear about information, services and job opportunities that could improve their wellbeing and prospects.

2. Government Agencies, the International Community and local NGOs (henceforth referred to as “agencies and NGOs”) have limited ability to communicate relevant services to the correct audience in a timely manner, especially to those that are the most vulnerable.

Together, these problems amount to a sustained limitation to:

1. The improvement of the conditions of migrants and refugees;
2. The effectiveness of programmes that seek to support migrants and refugees, especially the transition of SuTP away from ESSN into employment.

For Refugees:

ZAKA offers a self-sovereign ID wallet, the “ZAKA App”, that is private-by-design and contains two key functions

• Refugees can receive, hold and use verifiable digital ID credentials to access services listed in the ZAKA marketplace.
• Built-in messaging functionality for refugees to receive relevant, targeted and timely information from agencies and NGOs about key services that may benefit them or their family.

For organisations

A web App for agencies and NGOs enables them to:

• configure their listing and what credentials they will accept from refugees who want to access their services.
• segment, draft and send communications  to announce programmes and services
• refer beneficiaries to other services in the ZAKA marketplace

The tech

ZAKA is a self-sovereign identity solution that puts data ownership and control in the hands of the users. It is built on Hyperledger Indy and wrapped in proprietary IP that makes this complex tech inclusive and accessible. Our mobile Apps are available on iOS, Android and USSD. We offer APIs and SDKs for customised installations, but the minimum standard of service is available off-the-shelf. We offer Zero Knowledge Proofs for data minimisation and all communications are done peer-to-peer as well as encrypted in-flight and at-rest.

In Turkey the majority of refugees live among the host population and are classified as Syrians Under Temporary Protection. The majority are concentrated around Istanbul, Gaziantep and Ankara. Our project will initially focus on Istanbul and Gaziantep, with a particular focus on connecting people the opportunities that enhance their employability and self-reliance.

During an accelerator programme in Turkey in 2019 we conducted customer insights on the target audience in collaboration with Turkish Red Crescent, learning about the level of concern and mistrust surrounding support communications and the frustration at the lack of available services. The same frustration is mirrored by the service providers who feel that they are not reaching the target audience frequently and effectively enough.

We are engaging with a local refugee education programme called Re:Coded, which trains up and finds employment for refugees with technical skills, in the design and delivery of the solution, as well as running regular workshops with the end users in a human centred design process.

The solution is designed to bridge the gap in digital trust and communications between the end users and agencies that wish to serve them.

This broad community of refugees in Turkey are being pushed to achieve a greater degree of self-reliance, in order to reduce the pressure on public resources and drive an improvement in well-being of the displaced population that now lives in Turkey.

ZAKA's private and secure App creates a trustworthy and scalable convergence point for services that can help refugees to achieve this goal, and the refugees themselves. It is especially well-placed to solve this problem due to the advantages of privacy in the App, where people can remain anonymous while still proving certain facts through Zero Knowledge Proofs.

Data privacy and security

With SSI’s features of user-held, consent-driven, voluntary, peer-to-peer and encrypted communication protocols, privacy is a clear and defensible advantage of this technology. 

The ability to confirm certain facts without revealing sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) through Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) is hugely important.

By leveraging the blockchain for DID verification rather than public keys and certificate authorities, SSI avoids the risk of a single point of failure or man in the middle attack. This is a more cost-effective response to security threats than the alternatives designed to predict and prevent such attacks.

Customer ownership

How do private entities offer multi-functional digital ID credentials to customers without losing ownership of the customer? SSI allows the issuer of credentials to always be the undisputed and remunerable source of truth about those credentials.

Cost

The cost of delivering digital trust through SSI is competitive with existing technologies. A verifiable credential can be used an infinite number of times in combination with a biometric hash to verify identity and liveness to a high-degree of assurance through remote channels. Since all communications are peer-to-peer with simple ledger look-ups, the cost per transaction is negligible.

Ease of adoption and scale

ZAKA’s implementation of SSI is highly scalable. There is no need to integrate with APIs or SDKs (although we offer these things). Companies can begin issuing and verifying credentials simply by acquiring their “ZAKA Agent”, which is hosted in the cloud or on-prem.

ZAKA is built on Hyperledger Indy, an open source project under the Linux Foundation, with proprietary components that make it fit-for-purpose in the target use cases. ZAKA’s blockchain nodes are hosted in Microsoft’s Azure Cloud.

● Strong, industry-standard cryptography protects the ledger. The result is a reliable, public source of truth under no single entity’s control, robust to system failure, resilient to hacking, and highly immune to subversion by hostile entities.

● The ledger does not store any personally identifiable information about users and only maintains a log of issued and revoked credentials.

● ZAKA wraps the Indy App and enables users to have a unique digital self sovereign identity associated with them and stored in ZAKA App.

● All communications between services and ZAKA Apps are encrypted with the elliptic-curve ed2259 encryption system.

● Credentials are shared and verified with ZK-SNARK cryptographic techniques, allowing only the sharing of data needed for a secure operation.

● When authentication of client-side in https is required, the calls are signed with the help of SHA256 body signatures.

● As default, ZAKA does not store personally identifiable information about users on its server but can provide an optional encrypted backup service.

More detailed information about ZAKA’s technology is available on request.

https://sovrin.org/faq/what-is...

https://www.hyperledger.org/us...

Current: 600 to 1000

One year: 100,000 to 500,000

Five years: 10,000,000 to 15,000,000

1-year:

- Complete UNDP pilots and expand to full programme implementation

- Replicate refugee solution to 1-3 other locations

- Be connecting >100 services to >100,000 refugees, with at least two App interactions per month per person

5-years:

Our long-term vision is to enable any person, with any phone, to connect with any digital service, at any time. In this respect in 5-years we want:

- a footprint in 8 African countries where verifiable credentials are connecting >10m people with services that otherwise might not have been available to them

- the de facto trust solution for displaced persons and the services that seek to connect and communicate with them

Adoption

- We need the issuers, holders and verifiers of credentials to realise the value of the technology. While this is happening, the market is very much in the early adopter stage and a major challenge for any SSI player is to create thriving ecosystems for verifiable credentials that ultimately should be connected.

Standards

- There is still much work to do around the Governance and interoperability standards in SSI, although progress is being made at an unprecedented rate in a global collaboration of technologies, lawyers and policy makers

Regulation

- KYC regulation is a barrier to using verifiable credentials for passing top tier KYC standards

Triple-market adoption:

- Create ecosystems where value and utility is driven by the availability of verifiable credentials - such is between refugees and the services that want to support them.

Standards

- Continue engaging with and adopting emerging standards.

Regulation

- Enter sandbox environments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the technology for KYC purposes.