Digital ID in Southeast Asia

The brief

Yoti is a UK company building privacy-first digital ID. They wanted to know whether that kind of ID could do anything useful for people in developing countries, and whether grassroots NGOs in the humanitarian sector had any real appetite for it.

The research

I co-designed a rapid survey and landscape study, then we interviewed senior managers and grassroots workers from eleven organizations working across seven Asian nations. We asked how they manage participant identity information: the tools and systems they use, the problems they hit, and the opportunities they saw for doing it better.

What we found

Three challenges recurred everywhere. Documentation: identity papers often exist as a single, fragile copy that is hard or impossible to replace. Verification: projects have to confirm identities one case at a time, which is slow and excludes people. Fraud: weak project processes mean duplicated participant lists, unattempted verification and room for abuse. And yet everyone we interviewed saw digital ID as vital to their work.

The outcome

The findings were published in Yoti's overview report on grassroots non-profit digital identity needs and fed into how they approached identity work in emerging markets.