Page 51 - The Digital Financial Services (DFS) Ecosystem

ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services
Ecosystem

4 What characteristics of national identity programs are associated with connections to financial,
agricultural, and health services?
Section 2 of this report outlines our search and review methodology. In section 3, we present an overview
of the 48 national identity programs, including their technical components, implementation status, and
level of coverage. Evidence of implementation challenges these programs face is presented in section 4. In
section 5, we describe the functions linked to national identity programs, and in section 6 we evaluate what
characteristics of these programs are associated with service linkages. A spreadsheet providing greater detail
on the characteristics of each of the national identity programs we review is included as a supplement to this
report. In addition, we present summary case studies of the national identity programs of 12 selected focus
countries in Appendix D.

2 Methodology

We define national identity programs as government-initiated programs that assign a unique identification
number to each targeted participant, which is used for identification verification. We focus on identity programs
that have at least one functional authentication purpose, such as voter verification, government transfers,
and accessing financial or other services. In addition, we include only identity programs that operate at the
national level, except where sub-national government identity programs exist and are the only nationally-
recognized program.

We review national identity programs in 43 developing countries with 2013 populations over 15 million and
GDP per capita under US$10,000. Among the 43 countries of interest, we further provide in-depth case studies
for 12 focus countries based on supplemental searches of the available literature; these include: Bangladesh,
Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.
1
To analyze coverage and key characteristics of developing countries' national identity programs and evaluate
whether and how these programs are being connected to or used for service provision, we conducted a search
of both the academic and grey literature on the following databases:

• Google
• Google custom search of International Non-Governmental Organizations
• Center for Global Development
• Scopus

• Google Scholar
We employed a variety of search strings using terms relevant to national identity programs in general and
to the specific national identity programs of the countries of interest . We conducted additional searches to
2
target information gaps and complement the findings from the initial search, though evidence was limited for
many programs. Appendix A includes more detail on our search process and results.

During the initial search, we identified a total of 397 documents that appeared relevant to national identity
programs in the countries of interest. We supplement program-specific documents with articles from the
published and grey literature, though note that because of a limited literature in this area, much of the literature
cited in this report draws heavily on a few papers and authors. Based on these documents, we identified 48

1 The criteria for including countries were determined by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)’s Digital Financial Ser-
vices Ecosystems Working Group and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Financial Services for the Poor team, who requested
this review.
2 Our initial search string for each country was national AND (identity OR identification) AND (program OR system OR card) AND
“Country Name”.

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