The World Bank estimates that around a billion people across the globe lack a “legal identity.” The gender gap in terms of people’s access to official IDs is considerable in low-income countries, where one in two women lack any form of official ID. This limits financial, social, and political participation for women.

One in two women in low-income countries lack official identification documents, which limits their financial, social, and political participation. This report explores the design and lifecycle of ID systems from gender and behavioral lenses and proposes a framework to make them more gender-sensitive.

This note highlights three key challenges—abuse, availability, and access that telemedicine platforms in India, such as the government’s eSanjeevani, need to address. It also benchmarks eSanjeevani with other global telemedicine platforms and suggests strategies to tackle the prevalent challenges.

The focus note assesses the mobile applications Indian states developed to manage the COVID-19 pandemic, based on established principles of privacy. The note further proposes a paradigm shift to a more interoperable, open, API-based federated microservices architecture to ensure data privacy, predictability, and standardization in future G2C applications.

This blog reflects on the challenges of having a single biometric technology for authentication and suggests alternate contactless technologies that the government can deploy during a pandemic.

In the first blog from our new series on lessons from India for the world, we will look at the basic components of the digitized G2P ecosystem that enabled India to support beneficiaries even when the whole country was under lock down. We will follow this with detailed modules on each component.

On May 3rd, India completed 40 days in lockdown due to the COVID-19 health emergency. Epidemiologists and data scientists have created simulations and models to project the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, if preventive measures such as screening, isolation, quarantine and a nation-wide lockdown had not been implemented.