Co-creation gives MOSIP development a lift on path to sustainability

MOSIP’s vision of achieving open-source project sustainability rests in large part on contributions from the countries that adopt the modular digital identity platform.

“Countries needed to be active partners in shaping and evolving the digital infrastructure they adopted,” is how MOSIP VP of Country Implementations Krishnan Rajagopalan and Senior Associate for Policy and Outreach Rohit Ranjan Rai put it in a post to the organization’s MOSIP16.9 DPI journal.

Co-creation of software gives countries a way to address contextual mismatch and technological dependence, which the post identifies as two key challenges for DPI adoption. The approach aligns with MOSIP’s overall capacity-building strategy as a model for participatory development of digital public infrastructure.

Beyond building the code itself, helping countries build capacity is MOSIP’s main focus, Head of Ecosystem Sanjith Sundaram says in Biometric Update’s report on “Understanding MOSIP,” published in May. Representatives of several countries implementing MOSIP, including Ethiopia NIDP Executive Director Yodahe Zemichael, emphasized the importance of building local capacity in the report.

Platform expands with 2 co-created tools

Rajagopalan and Rai highlight collaborations with Ethiopia and Cambodia as two examples of successful co-creation.

Ethiopia collaborated with MOSIP to create the Android Registration Client (ARC) when its registration campaign expanded to remote areas of the country using tablets. An ARC was already on MOSIP’s roadmap, according to the post, but Ethiopia’s functional necessity and engineering “expertise in building resource-efficient Android applications” accelerated its development.

Cambodia sought to use eSignet as the basis for a common authentication layer for government services integrating the national digital ID. Different services require different levels of assurance, however, which eSignet did not internally support. Six months of collaborative development later, MOSIP and Cambodia introduced the Unified Login Portal.

The tool has not yet been launched by Cambodia, but the eSignet Unified Login Portal, like the ARC co-developed with Ethiopia, is already available for other countries adopting MOSIP.

Building local capacity can help contribute to MOSIP’s core code, but for countries, the investment in capacity pays off over the long term. Zemichael noted how the sustainability of the business model of Ethiopia’s national digital ID, Fayda, has made developing increased DevOps capacity within the government increasingly important during a webinar on the MOSIP ecosystem hosted by Biometric Update earlier this month.

Article Topics

Cambodia  |  digital public infrastructure  |  Ethiopia  |  MOSIP (Modular Open Source Identity Platform)  |  open source  |  research and development