Concept Note: Understanding women’s access to services through digital IDs

Module 1: Problem statement 

A legal identity can provide access to key services like social welfare services, humanitarian aid, financial services, banking options, mobile numbers, travel, and other vital services. However, to effectively access these services, women often lack such identification and face a plethora of other challenges. Even with 

legal documentation, women face multifarious challenges when interacting with such digital systems. Some of these challenges could be faced by women when interacting with digital systems in general. 

Community-based entities (CBEs), research and academic entities play an important role in understanding, enabling, and strengthening women’s access to vital public and private services through various initiatives. Research organisations influence key stakeholders by generating relevant evidence and providing strategic recommendations to improve such systems. Academicians and individuals working on the intersection of technology and society help in building the understanding and shaping up discourse for the public, including the CBEs and research organisations. Similarly, CBEs that implement programs provide access to vital services, and in turn facilitate securing critical identity documents for the communities they work with. 

Inclusive access to digital systems and ensuring inclusivity within a system are areas that need attention. As conduits to their communities, CBEs, research entities and academicians should: 

• Participate in cross learning and share key insights from their work
• Strengthen and continuously update their understanding about relevant identity systems 
• Connect with global networks to engage with transformative systems holistically and provide more robust strategies to their stakeholders 

The need for a COP to understand Identity, Access, and Inclusion 

Various multi-stakeholder coalitions convene macro level players, however a common platform to discuss the above areas and initiatives that convene key actors like CBEs are missing. Through the levers of access and inclusion, this COP

hopes to embark on this initiative to better inform ID systems. While this COP will start by understanding the larger ecosystem of women’s interaction with digital systems, over the first 3 meetings, the scope of the initiative will be defined more specifically to ID systems. 

Creating such networks, sharing learning spaces, and consolidating ecosystem insights to create a reflexive feedback loop that improves women’s interactions with digital systems is the need of the hour. The insights generated from such an initiative hopes to bolster gender inclusive strategies in the online and offline mechanisms for systems. 

To address some of the issues highlighted above, stakeholders are encouraged to participate in a ‘Community of Practice’ (COP) initiative. This COP hopes to engage with entities and individuals within the spectrum of research and program implementation that typically work or have some presence in the space of: 

• Women empowerment (through digital or non-digital pathways)
• Generate evidence or work as support functions for ID systems
• Improving access to government services or facilitating provision of financial and welfare services 
• Improving socio-economic outcomes via capacity building, providing access to livelihood opportunities, and supporting entrepreneurship opportunities 
• Engaging with people through civic governance mechanisms 

Participation is not limited to the areas mentioned above and can also include entities that are sector and theme adjacent. 

The following document elucidates the pillars behind creating a mutually beneficial learning environment, like this COP.

Module 2: Pillars of the Community of Practice on Identity (COP: ID) 

To address the above problem statement, Aapti Institute in collaboration with MOSIP, proposes building out the COP: ID initiative. This COP hopes to convene, learn and collaborate with entities that work in the spaces mentioned in Module 1 or in theme-adjacent spaces as well. This COP hopes to understand the challenges faced by women when engaging with ID systems and provide suggestions to the key actors to address the same. 

The COP participants would strive to identify major challenge areas for women when navigating the digital ecosystem and other digital systems, eventually understanding experiences more specific with ID systems. The platform would be an opportunity to dissect these challenges with diverse perspectives and create a strategic and collaborative approach. 

The group would also act as a platform for knowledge sharing and cross-learning, and deep dive into each identified theme with learning sessions to discuss and analyse the different normative approaches to inclusion. 

Objectives of this COP 

1. Forge a shared understanding of inclusion, leverage relevant information through an accessible platform, and build a reflexive research loop to improve technology and policy design 
2. Help organisations understand and articulate linkages to identity systems and break information silos between gender and digital communities 
3. Generate evidence and suggestions for gender-sensitive design, implementation, governance, and usage of IDs 

Operationalising the COP 

This COP hopes to be a sustainable initiative that continues to deal with key themes such as inclusion and access. While the COP hopes to include more stakeholders and engage in different geographical and contextual areas, a roadmap for the initial stages is integral. With the development and actualisation of shared goals, the COP would ideally evolve into a space for practitioners to engage deeply over the long term. 

Initial stage: An agenda document will be shared with all participating entities prior to the meeting which will contain the theme and topics of discussion for the meeting. These meetings would also serve as potential areas for participating entities to shed light on intersecting work. Subsequent meetings will be structured after receiving feedback from the participating entities. 

• A series of 5 virtual meetings will be conducted once every 2 months
• Meetings 1 – 3 will be structured similar to the format listed below
• Meetings 4 and 5, the COP will aim to receive inputs from participants on co-created research tools. 

This structure would evolve depending on how the mutually developed goals are created 

Themes and topics for engagement

Sessions will be anchored on a specific theme with topics of discussion being discussed by the experts and participants. Potential topics and themes will be mapped to engage with COP participants. Speaker panels and expert presentations will be anchored on the following topics, after being mapped to the relevant thematic areas. The first 5 virtual meetings could be structured accordingly, but could change depending on the evolution of the COP’s shared goals:

Benefits for the COP participants: 

• Access to a diverse learning platform: Access to co-learning space and co-created knowledge with diverse group of individuals and organisations
• Informing technology design: Leverage the connectivity of participatory organisations to engage directly with key ecosystem stakeholders 
• Access to key networking opportunities: Connecting with global networks and entities to participate in global communities. Timely reminders and support to mutually explore opportunities to participate in global forums and leveraging connections within the platform. 
• Avenues for co-creation and collaboration: Sharing spaces to co-develop synergistic working areas with participants. 
• Strengthen initiatives by gaining diverse perspectives: Participants will gain access to organisations working through different lenses that could strengthen program and research outputs.

Module 3: Call to Action 

This initiative requests participation from CBEs, research organisations, independent researchers and academicians working in the thematic areas mentioned in Module 1. Additionally, entities working at the intersection or finding synergies in the spaces of gender inclusion, access to services, civic governance, and digital rights are also requested to join. The COP is an evolving body and presently, the community is focused on individuals and organisations with a presence in Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. We eventually hope to grow this initiative to engage with other global stakeholders and encompass other groups to broaden our understanding of inclusion. 

Potential pathways for entities to participate in the COP 

Participation in learning sessions & key virtual events	● Virtual events will be held once every 2 months (90 minutes session each)  ● Events will consist of learning sessions on mutually identified themes, highlighting relevant research by participants or external organisations.
Sharing relevant knowledge and learnings	● Documents will be housed in an online repository (website) for public and easy access – participants can share their research and documents to this repository for increased searchability  ● Information will be consolidated by the Aapti team ● Interested stakeholders will be added to a mailing list and will receive relevant information
Consolidation and distillation of insights at forums and for communities	● Participants can consider sharing consolidated documents within their ecosystems  ● Participants can leverage available resources and networks to participate in forums or other convenings  ● Participants can collaborate to co-create notes that inform technology and policy design

Potential outputs from this initiative, anchored by Aapti Institute: 

• Learning consolidation: Consolidating research from participating entities on an online repository 
• Event readbacks: Consolidating insights captured during sessions that could be disseminated during global conferences or other similar events
• Consolidated toolkit: Insights from these sessions will help inform a toolkit that hopes to provide recommendations around incorporating gender inclusive system design 
• Optional outputs: Additional outputs can be co-created as per the discretion of the participatory entities as as well as the evolution of the COP initiative.