Thread by @PelleB

1/ Very interesting article about the clash between traditional and government identity in Tanzania. thecitizen.co.tz/magazine/sound…

It highlights many of the problems you will see imposing European Identity systems in very different cultures. Including initiatives like #ID4D

2/ Notice that the traditional identity system like most in Africa is quite dynamic and nuanced.

You see mentions of tribal affiliation, clans, family relationships, and geographical origin. Some people want to disclose these relationships and some don't.

3/ There is a noted frustration in the tone of the government officials who just want people to use the colonially imposed naming system of first-, middle-, and surname that can easily fit into their government registration systems.

4/ In The Mystery of Capital, we learned from @ReadingSignals the dangers of imposing foreign institutions ontop of traditional societies and how they rarely work without serious cultural adoption.

5/ Yet the Worldbank and UN through initiatives like #ID4D, #ID2020 and #GoodID are continuing to impose European concepts of Identity created during the industrial age onto countries in Africa.

6/ I personally feel most of these will fail, because they don't actually solve any real problems for the citizens of these countries.

Rather they are created to solve problems the donor organizations have. The World Bank #ID4D program, in particular, is about this.

7/ Don't get me wrong, as the leader of an Identity project @uport_me I definitely see Identity as being important.

Yet I don't think biometrics and central identity registries are the way to go. They aren't nuanced enough and are too tied into 20th-century Western use cases.

8/ In some ways these #ID4D schemes are similar to the WorldBank requiring all citizens to use Fax machines.

We have much better solutions today than centrally issued biometric identity cards.

In much of the world mobile numbers and god help us even Facebook do a better job.

9/ When in Kenya years ago with my old @KipochiPay startup, I somehow ended up in the middle of the debate around how to fit the Somali Hawala systems into the @FATFNews imposed international financial guidelines.

10/ Several NGO's argued at a crisis meeting held by the UN in Nairobi that the only solution to save this vital yet traditional decentralized payment system, was to help Somalia adopt a European like National Identity System so the Hawalars could KYC their customers.

11/ Yet my friend @giazzolino who is an expert in Hawala systems pointed out that the entire trust in this system is based on detailed knowledge of their customers based in an age-old Somali identity system.

Frankly, they were much better at KYC than Danske Bank in Denmark.

14/ That whole situation really bothered me. Four years ago I started work on @uport_me.

Back then I set my self a goal that what we built, would one day allow members of any community to be able to represent themselves and who they are using our technology.

15/ Decentralized Identity Systems like @uport_me are much better at this than central registries. Unlike in Centralized Identity Systems, the identifier itself (a DID) is not really that important.

You create your identifier yourself and build up credentials about yourself.

16/ However this is also not really perfect. We don't live as Digital Hermits and are mostly identified by our relationships and activities.

Almost all traditional identity systems, including in Europe represent graphs of relationships and not a centrally issued number.

17/ Our new #TrustGraph technology that we are slowly launching brings this much closer. It allows you to use DID's and Verifiable Credentials to create a graph not just of credentials but of relationships.

It isn't magic though. It's just tech.

18/ How would you use this instead of #ID4D initiatives? Primarily this is a tool that can be used by local people with real knowledge of problems and use-cases such as @pesa_africa in Kenya or @uport_me's own @chickstrummer in Nigeria.

19/ It will take some patience and imagination by both funding organizations, the FATF and local governments.

You won't be able to cut and paste institutions and regulations from Northern Europe into Africa. You actually can't do that today either.

20/ There might be fewer income opportunities for foreign consultants and providers of centralized identity systems.

But this is also an opportunity to allow some of the amazing entrepreneurial and technical talents in #Africa to grow and show the world how it's done.

21/ Just wanted to add that Decentralized Identity systems like @uport_me also solve important use cases in countries with well functioning centralized identity systems.
As seen with the EUs ESSIF initiative it can help make sense of ID across national silos.