Yoti Research Highlights Digital ID Needs in 10 African Countries

Yoti is sharing some of the findings from its recent groundwork investigating the applications of its identity technology with nonprofit organizations in Africa.

The research revolved around online surveys of organizations in ten countries: Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, South Sudan, Uganda, Liberia, Tanzania, Somalia, Rwanda, and Zambia. The company polled organizations from a range of sectors, from health to sports to sanitation.

Writing about the work on a new blog post, research lead Kevin Madegwa highlights a number of salient findings: For example, some respondents highlighted a need for technology that could be used to identify infants, since sometimes deaths occur from duplicate immunization treatments. Another respondent insisted on the need for digital identification that could run offline, for situations in which internet connectivity is not consistently available. Community healthcare clinicians, meanwhile, pointed to the need for digitization tools that would allow more efficient administration of paperwork.

Yoti doesn’t have solutions to all of these issues, at least not yet. But as the company continues to promote and develop its digital identity platform, which uses mobile facial recognition and document reading for authentication, as a means of citizen ID around the world, the company is clearly putting some effort into finding out exactly what the needs are of the communities it’s trying to serve.