In a new report issued in collaboration with Accenture, the World Bank is calling on governments to work together to implement standardized, cost-effective identity management solutions.
A report synopsis notes that about 1.8 billion adults around the world currently lack any kind of official documentation. That can exclude those individuals from access to essential services, and can also cause serious difficulties when it comes to trans-border identification.
That problem is one that Accenture has been tackling in collaboration with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which has been issuing Accenture-developed biometric identity cards to populations of displaced persons in refugee camps in Thailand, South Sudan, and elsewhere. The ID cards are important for helping to ensure that refugees can have access to services, and for keeping track of refugee populations.
Moreover, the nature of the deployments has required an economically feasible solution, and has demonstrated that reliable, biometric ID cards can affordably be used on a large scale. It offers hope for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal of getting legal ID into the hands of everyone in the world by the year 2030 with its Identification for Development (ID4D) initiative.
Discussion about this post