MOSIP building “an ecosystem” of biometrics labs, partnering with more universities

MOSIP is focusing on expanding its engagement with the biometrics ecosystem, as well as different use cases for the foundational ID platform and different regions of the world, attendees of a ‘Partner Conversations’ event held in Nairobi, Kenya, on the eve of ID4Africa’s 2023 annual general meeting were told.

Most of the executive and leadership team for MOSIP (Modular Open Source Identity Platform) was present at the event to provide updates on each aspect of the project.

The event attracted representatives from nearly 100 partners, potential partners and supporting organizations. When a slide filled with the logos of MOSIP’s 80-plus commercial partners was shown, Chief Dissemination Officer Nagarajan Santhanam summed up: “They’re all here.”

Indeed, the conference room was mostly full with nearly 200 attendees when the event began, and the remaining empty seats filled up when the last arrivals made it through the notorious Nairobi traffic.

The updates included details on MOSIP’s toolkit and marketplace, and items on the roadmap for the year ahead, which include research into biometric quality, the use of voice biometrics, standards. Further development of the MOSIP stack, including Inji digital wallet and eSignet software for identity verification, was also detailed.

A new area of engagement for MOSIP is biometrics testing laboratories, where the biometric device certification framework developed with BixeLab is advancing. BixeLab is being onboarded, Ingenium Biometrics is up next, and MOSIP is now accepting applications from accredited labs to test against the framework.

MOSIP is also currently working with French lab Serna.

“What we are building now is an ecosystem of labs,” MOSIP Ecosystem Head Sanjith Sundaram explains.

Chair Prof. Debabrata Das told the audience that MOSIP originally aimed to for implementation by 4 countries by 2024. Instead, it is up to production deployments in five, with pilots in five more and further engagements soon to be announced. The IIT-Bangalore that hosts MOSIP has now moved on to creating OpenG2P for benefits delivery and CDPI for critical digital public infrastructure.

Santhanam noted that Madagascar is the first country to pilot MOSIP in the cloud.

One of the announcements coming, he says, is an announcement of a “brownfield” deployment, meaning one where a country is looking to upgrade an existing identity system.

Head of Country Implementations Krishana Rajagopalan spoke about the MOSIP Experience Centre, and the commissioning of the model for digital identity experience centres that include the platform and its partner ecosystem at the University of the Philippines and CMU (Carnegie Melon University) Rwanda. MOSIP is also in conversation with other universities in various geographies around the world, as it works towards expansion into Latin America and the Caribbean.

MOSIP also recently held a two-day ‘Country Conversations’ event, where the organization discussed translating its digital identity guidance into more languages.

Article Topics

biometric testing  |  biometrics  |  digital ID  |  ID4Africa 2023  |  identity management  |  MOSIP (Modular Open Source Identity Platform)  |  standards