Digital Public Goods MOSIP & OpenG2P Announce Collaboration
OpenG2P, a digital public good co-founded by the Government of Sierra Leone, Mifos, and open source volunteers, and catalyzed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), has announced its collaboration with Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP). OpenG2P is a framework that brings together a suite of digital public goods (DPGs) to enable governments and humanitarian agencies to identify, onboard, and deliver cash and non-cash benefits to people.
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digitalisation in ways that were unimaginable just two years ago, highlighting the fundamental role that digital ID and government-to-person (G2P) ecosystems can play in helping a country to deliver services and social assistance to its people rapidly, effectively and responsibly. When the services that enable a digital society are delivered via DPGs – open source digital solutions that advance the sustainable development goals and do no harm – additional benefits are unlocked for countries, institutions, and businesses. Because DPGs are adoptable, interoperable and transparent, they facilitate collaborations like this one between OpenG2P and MOSIP.
“The Government of Sierra Leone is enthusiastic for the opportunities that lie ahead through this collaboration. We are thrilled that a framework built by our local innovators and utilized in the successful Ebola payments program for health workers in 2015 is now taking a life of its own after advanced development to support COVID-19 and other development related activities here in Sierra Leone,” said David Sengeh, Chief Innovation Officer, Government of Sierra Leone, a co-founder of the Digital Public Goods Alliance.
MOSIP will boost the vision of OpenG2P by providing stewardship to lead its technical roadmap and explore reference implementations, connecting the OpenG2P technology stack with its open source identity management solutions. OpenG2P’s co-founder, Mifos, is another digital public good catalyzing payment ecosystems and part of the OpenG2P framework. Mifos will continue to lend leadership to the OpenG2P roadmap, working with Fynarfin to support efforts to enhance related features in the Mifos Payment Hub and orchestration engine.
“Through this collaboration, we hope to embed digital identity and government-to-person payment systems within broader digital public infrastructures to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of payments to people. At the same time, we are placing human rights and privacy-first approaches at the center to make sure no one is left behind,” said Robert Opp, Chief Digital Officer, UNDP
MOSIP’s vision is to unlock the power of digital identity by providing effective G2P frameworks that work seamlessly with the identity platform. MOSIP will lead the governance and roadmap of OpenG2P, leveraging the expertise and networks of the wider DPG ecosystems transforming into a formal governance structure that includes Mifos in a governance leadership role.
Speaking on the occasion, Prof S Rajagopalan, President of MOSIP said, “Enabling digital identity for all is the first step. Implementers of digital identity systems are driven by the motivation to seamlessly deliver services to end users. We admire the OpenG2P community’s vision for a digital public good digitizing large scale cash transfers. Governments, being the largest providers of services to individuals, need effective solutions and tools at their disposal for management of their programs. We hope that with this collaboration, we can together enhance the pathways for service delivery, through an effective G2P technology infrastructure.”
About MOSIP
MOSIP (Modular Open-Source Identification Platform) was incubated at IIIT-Bangalore as a global digital public good. The platform’s modular architecture, easy configuration, and customisation abilities, enables countries the flexibility to build their foundational digital ID systems in a cost-effective manner.
MOSIP enables countries to realize a digital identity led development and transformation agenda. Our vision is to help build a digital future that is interoperable, inclusive and trusted.
Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates’ Foundation, Tata Trust, Omidyar Networks, and NORAD, the platform is being adopted by the Philippines, Morocco, and Togo, and piloted in Sri Lanka, Ethiopia and Guinea.
About Sierra Leone’s Directorate of Science, Technology and Innovation
Set up in 2018 to use science, technology, and innovation to support the Government of Sierra Leone to deliver on its National Development Plan effectively and efficiently; and to help transform Sierra Leone into an innovation and entrepreneurship hub; the Directorate of Science, Technology, and Innovation (DSTI) sits in the Office of the President and executes its functions through the Office of the Chief Minister.
DSTI works across all sectors in government developing tools for government service delivery and data systems that provide citizens with digital services whilst strengthening an innovation culture in Sierra Leone. DSTI works with partners locally and internationally to execute its mission and objectives and contributes to the global agenda using science, technology, and innovation to achieve the sustainable development goals; one such example is it being a founding member of the Digital Public Goods Alliance.
For more information contact: info@dsti.gov.sl or visit www.dsti.gov.sl
About Mifos
The Mifos Initiative is a global 501(c)3 fintech non-profit leveraging the cloud, mobile & open source community to democratize financial services worldwide and digitally transform the world’s 3 billion poor and underbanked. Mifos has pioneered open source banking technology for the past fifteen years transforming the entire sector at each major stage of evolution from microfinance to financial inclusion to digital financial service.
Mifos guides the open source community, steers the roadmap, and stewards the vibrant ecosystem of organizations building solutions on top of Mifos and Apache Fineract. Their building blocks for banking, recognized as digital public goods and digital public infrastructure to achieve the UN SDG of no poverty, make core banking commoditized infrastructure, empowering any organization, anywhere to embed any financial service to any customer via any channel. Mifos was chosen as an MIT Solver for the 2021 Digital Inclusion Global Challenge and awarded the 2021 Banking Tech Award for Best Contribution to Economic Mobility in Banking & Finance. More than 20 million clients are reached by 500+ financial institutions across 56 countries using solutions powered by its APIs.
For more information, contact info@mifos.org