The Rohingya Project

A grassroots initiative seeking to provide opportunity through identity for the stateless Rohingya diaspora worldwide.

For over 30 years, the Rohingya have lived in a limbo of statelessness. Driven out of their ancestral land in Burma, living largely undocumented in different countries across the world and denied even basic rights that people take for granted, the struggles the Rohingya diaspora face are severe. As a result of their stateless condition, approximately three million Rohingya live as an invisible people on the margins, and are vulnerable to destitution, human trafficking, and other maladies. 

Through the creation of a digital identity, the Rohingya Project is targeting a central issue the Rohingya diaspora face as a result of statelessness: financial exclusion. Many second and third generation stateless Rohingya live on the margins in their host societies and encounter significant obstacles in generating a livelihood and keeping themselves out of poverty. The goal of the Project is to connect these Rohingya to opportunities to learn, equip and empower themselves and the wider Rohingya diaspora through technology. 

Through the creation of a Blockchain-leveraged self-sovereign identity system, those Rohingya who for years have been sidelined can be given access to a range of financial applications and other services to encourage collaboration, innovation and entrepreneurship. The platform will tap into the entrepreneurial potential of the Rohingya community and offer options to counter their exclusion from the mainstream. 

Over time, the Project will strive to be a space where the stateless Rohingya can organize themselves and support their own on-the-ground and virtual initiatives to further their community's interests, and be an open-source model that other stateless and marginalized communities can use.

While the world may know the Rohingya now as only victims, the Rohingya Project's mission is to bring their dignity back. 

Our digital identity solution is innovative in a couple of respects. Firstly, the use case of the Rohingya is very special, given that that they are a decentralized, undocumented and stateless population that is amenable to the use of Blockchain as a identity solution.

Secondly, our digital identity effort stems from within the Rohingya stateless community itself, which makes it a unique community empowerment initiative. We are attempting to create an eco-system that may be a foundation for the future of the next generation of Rohingya who see little hope now.

Rohingya Project was recently accepted into the 'Identity for Good' Accelerator Program of Blockchain identity provider Evernym (https://www.evernym.com/identityforgood/) allowing adaption of their open source self-sovereign ID solution for our specific use case.

The self-sovereign identity model requires consent on use of data by the Identity Owner. The Owner shows his or her consent through the acceptance of a Proof Request from a Verifier. Finally, because the Identity Owner’s Agent keeps records of all acceptances, the Identity Owner can easily later revoke access to the shared Credential or Claim. The Identity Owner and the Verifier both keep a log of all digitally signed transactions on their respective copies of their shared microledger. 

The above allows compliance with GDPR standards specific to consent being "freely given; obtained through an affirmative act of the data subject; revocable; and provable".

Currently, we are in the preliminary phase of adapting the ID and verification to our own design specifications particular to the Rohingya Project for our Pilot. The self-sovereign ID allows the user control over the privacy and selection of their personal data, and allows them to decide which third party vendor can view their specific data. This allows for integration of the existing system within the mainstream financial institutions as long as specific e-KYC requirements can be met and the integrity of the ID system can be verified. 

It should also be noted that of the 150,000 Rohingya approximately living in Malaysia, only a fraction have access to a UNHCR card, and the remaining are entirely undocumented. Major Rohingya populations in Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia also are largely undocumented and outside the mainstream system.

The individual Rohingya user first must download the Rohingya Project ID wallet to their mobile phone. They must then begin entering their application for identity (or be assisted by a RP assigned field officer if they are unable).  After submitting the application, this application is reviewed manually by our RP team. If approved, the applicant is given an interview date. The interview is a screening process to confirm the individual's identity and allow them to undergo a Rohingya proof of claim. Following this approval, the digital ID is issued in the e-wallet. 

Yes, these will be developed specifically in terms of financial service integration to allow for individual Rohingya with the self-sovereign ID to meet e-KYC requirements with cooperation from local banking services. Discussions along these lines are underway. 

Our Rohingya Project has a central field office that will provide training and registration assistance regarding the use of the application for Rohingya of low literacy and technical knowledge. We have a core Rohingya Action Committee (RAC) of 40 plus field officers who are tasked to faciliatate in the registration process for the initial 1000 Rohingya in our pilot phase this year. 

Expanding the RAC unit with trained field officers can allow for manual registration of Rohingya in those areas with low connectivity access. 

The pilot phase (June to December 2019) will be reviewed both in terms of convenience and efficiency of digital identity registration, ease of financial application use and relevant Rohingya community feedback.

Following the review, the scale up stage will look into building the foundations for an expanded eco-system for the Rohingya community, particularly centered in Malaysia, with token and crowdfunding applications for financial inclusion.

The scale up will expand the ID based of users to target 10,000 users by the end of 2020, and improve the functionality of existing financial apps and offer possible apps from third party vendors.

Identity Partner - Evernym - Accepted into Evernym's Identity for Good Accelerator Program, offering customization of Self-Sovereign ID and knowledge support

Research Partner - The University of Washington, Seattle - Conducting applied research focusing on applicability of Blockchain ID within international the regulatory framework and data/privacy concerns. 

Fintech Partner - Ata Plus Sdn Bhd - Building crowdfunding platform for Rohingya users to pitch project based on Actyvate (https://actyvate.my/) website

Our founder and managing director, Muhammad Noor, is a Rohingya himself and has established several Rohingya institutions and trained several highly-regarded members of the Rohingya community worldwide. His most notable contributions include the digitization and Unicode of First Rohingya Alphabet, serving as the chairman of Rohingya Football Club, and director of the first Rohingya broadcast station, Rvision.

Aside from him, we have deep access into the Rohingya community through a field team of over 40 Rohingya officers with wide network reach to implement grassroots projects. 

In order to ensure long term profitability, the Rohingya Project will introduce a set a minor user entry fees into the financial platform to initiate access to the financial applications, as well as annual subscription charges based on long term use.

The crowdfunding Actyvate platform will also allow for management expenses to be deducted from crowdfunded resources as part of the cost for running the platform and assisting Rohingya users in dispersal of funds. 

We strongly believe identity is a right for all. This is particularly acute in the case of the Rohingya, who have been systemically denied official identity for decades after being stripped of citizenship. 

We believe if the Rohingya can not only be given access to a secure digital identity, but they can be gradually taught the importance of maintaining their own data privacy and protection to mitigate against the risks of centralized data erasure that they have been victims from already.

In order to carry forward with our pilot phase for 2019 of registering the first pool of 1,000 Rohingya in Malaysia with self-sovereign digital identity, it is necessary to cover the upfront tech development costs of customization of this ID according to our Project specifications. This financial cost at present is an existing barrier to moving the Pilot forward more expediently on our timeline though we are still proceeding.

Along with this, we hope to continue to work with relevant UN agencies as we have recently to allow for easier integration of our solution with existing systems.