Feeding Millions in Yemen: Dealing with an Identity Crisis
Yemen has played an important role in the powerful kingdoms and dynasties that have left their footprints on the Arabian Peninsula and Africa for thousands of years. Despite the fact that Yemen was formally reunified in 1990 and peace talks have been ongoing since 2016, the country’s government, economy, and people are all in shambles as a result of the ongoing hostilities that started with the British withdrawal to the north in 1967.
Even when the violence subsides, malnutrition persists. According to a 2019 United Nations estimate, more than 75% of Yemen’s population, or more than 24 million people, are in need of food and other humanitarian aid. When you realize that 40% of the population is under the age of 15, you can understand how dire the situation is.
Overcoming Identity Issues in Order to Help
Despite mobilizing the world’s largest humanitarian food assistance organization to react to the catastrophe in Yemen, they quickly realized they would be unable to assist the country until it addressed its identification issues.
Birth certificates, driver’s licenses, voter registration, citizenship papers, and Social Security cards are all popular and straightforward to procure in many countries, hence the idea of “identity” is taken for granted. However, we at M2SYS are well aware that this is not the case in Yemen. We know that their means of identifying people and maintaining track of their records are either old or nonexistent since we constructed their biometric voter registration database.
Accurate understanding of where and who needs food help in Yemen is critical for effective distribution of such aid.
The challenges were considerable. Yemen has been shattered by internal and external conflicts, increasing human suffering and interrupting food production and distribution networks, and there was no credible national ID database or legal identification framework in place. Because of the conflicts, millions of people have been compelled to seek refuge inside their own country. Furthermore, negative actors inside the country began “gaming the system” of help, resulting in food and money being transferred to the wrong individuals.
Without initially gathering trustworthy data on the “who” and “where” of the issue, it would be impossible to create and execute a dependable food assistance system.
Because the organization realized the need of identifying and authenticating the household head and adult members of each beneficiary family group, it supported the creation of a biometric system to do this. Food will only be provided to families where the head of the household (or their designated representative) has been registered in the biometric database. This sensible technique aims to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse while also ensuring that assistance reaches those in need. Misappropriation of food is frequent in many famine-stricken areas, and it might originate from criminal groups wanting to sell NGO-supplied food on the illicit market.
The Solution: A Centralized Repository For All National Biometric Data
The new method works by enrolling the head of each household using a fingerprint scanner, which then uploads all ten fingerprints to a central database. If you wish to enroll or verify someone’s identification with pinpoint accuracy, you need have their fingerprints on file.
Once a record is added to the database, it is duplicated to guarantee that no one is added more than once. When customers arrive at a distribution location, assist them in verifying their identification with a single fingerprint. This strategy prevents fraud and exploitation of humanitarian assistance by ensuring that only individuals who have registered to get food for their family actually receive it.
Over the last 20 years, M2SYS Technology has collaborated with a diverse range of integrators, partners, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and government agencies to successfully complete over 100 government projects. Our M2SYS eGov platform may be customized by system integrators to fit the demands of any government digital transformation program, wherever in the globe. It has robotics, AI, and biometrics built in, and it can interface with any external platform without issue. Integrators may make adjustments to identification criteria, process automation, user interfaces, and more in a matter of hours if you connect your existing systems to our engine.
