OpenG2P is making strides in Ethiopia and Zambia as bigger roll-outs and pilots lie ahead

On the third day of MOSIP Connect 2025, not-for-profit OpenG2P had two presentations back-to-back on the digital public good (DPG).

Offering open-source building blocks for governments to digitize and automate social benefit delivery processes, the audience heard the impact it can have on people’s lives. Available on GitHub under open-source licenses, the OpenG2P code can help facilitate social benefits delivery, from government to person (hence G2P).

From the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Institute (ATI), Girum Ketema travelled from Addis Ababa to Manila to relay his experience at MOSIP Connect, along with other OpenG2P collaborators. Ketema described the challenges they face in Ethiopia, which is a large country with many rural communities. He said farmers are not always motivated to register (for government financial assistance) and that they “stay in their village.”

To address this, bigger socialization workshops are on the cards as they look to embark on a larger pilot. That’s because OpenG2P provides the digital backbone for the Farmer Registry, which is one of the projects the DPG is involved with in Ethiopia. The others are the Emergency Relief Programme, Returnee Programme and the Urban Destitute Programme.

OpenG2P allows for registration and authentication, deduplication, eligibility and enrollment, entitlement, and disbursement of funds. That is not a comprehensive outline of its capabilities, but at its heart it allows governments to better deliver benefits to the citizens who need it most.

Next, Frank Kelemba from the Smart Zambia team said OpenG2P’s intended purpose was disaster relief and assistance, providing food and money. With drought and floods, OpenG2P helped them to manage disaster relief. The system they had had inefficiencies with data duplication.

“OpenG2P has a powerful provision of social register,” Kelemba says. “It helped us a lot. It can remove duplicates, it can integrate with payments and mobile money.” Kelemba added that in remote parts of Zambia, they can collect data offline, since the internet is unavailable, then upload “very quickly” once in a connected area.

An audience member asked the African delegates if they had faced challenges in service delivery. Dawit Abraham from the EDRMC took up the baton. He said that five percent of Ethiopians didn’t have a bank account or SIM card making it difficult to deliver benefits. In this case they turned to “cash through envelope,” with an official travelling to the area, with the envelope, whereupon they will photograph and confirm identity, and hand over the funds.

However, to further remedy the problem, Abraham said they also provide discounted mobile phones and SIM cards to beneficiaries.

While technical, from the words of the Ethiopian and Zambian delegates, it seems OpenG2P is making its real-world mark. To learn more visit OpenG2P.

 

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Article Topics

digital public goods  |  government services  |  MOSIP (Modular Open Source Identity Platform)  |  MOSIP Connect 2025  |  open source  |  OpenG2P  |  social protection