Learnings from the SDG Impact Accelerator
We spent the month of July with the SDG Impact Accelerator in Turkey. The accelerator’s goal is to enable market-creating innovations that help achieve the UN Sustainable Development goals. Ware super excited to have been selected for the final phase which is starting this week. We’ll be spending the next month in Turkey, working with government officials, the UNDP, WFP, the Gates Foundation and our fellow digital identity start-ups ( Tykn B.V., Sertifier, and ZAKA) to develop a solution which helps improve livelihood opportunities for refugees.
During the first month, our focus was to explore the potential of decentralized Identity to improve the livelihoods of Syrian refugees. We had the chance to discuss for hours with people from the refugee community. They shared with us their challenges when it comes to accessing employment and education. Also, we managed to talk with decision-makers from many different organizations. These included the Turkish Directorate General of Migration, UNHCR, UNDP, ILO, the Turkish Red Crescent, and many others.
Turkey hosts more than 4 million refugees, most of them from Syria. Almost all live in towns and cities across Turkey, there are no refugee camps. The Turkish state has spent more than $30 billion on all of this. And the infrastructure that they have built so far with their partners is impressive. There is almost universal access to healthcare and education for children. And the WfP and the Turkish Red Crescent are running one of the biggest cash transfer programs in the world with 1.5 million beneficiaries.
How to find jobs for 4 million people?
Now that the emergency is under control, the big question is: How 4 million people that speak a different language be integrated into society, find jobs and live their lives in dignity?
This is a daunting task, especially when it comes to finding employment. We’ve learned that there are a whole number of barriers that refugees have to overcome to find work.
First, there’s language. The language courses offered are quite short and being in an Arabic speaking environment for most of the day makes it very hard to improve.
Second, there’s a lack of verifiability of their Syrian education credentials. Sometimes, the certificate itself is missing, sometimes it’s there but not certified by the right entity. One woman even mentioned that she could get her diploma certified by a body of the temporary government of Syria. But she is shying away from doing that out of fear of retaliation if she ever goes back and the government has changed. What makes things worse is that many Syrian refugees are well qualified. While the group we spoke with was certainly not representative, there were people with law degrees, a PhD in chemistry, and a veterinarian.
Third, there’s discrimination by employers that exploit the fact that refugees often have little legal means if they are not being paid. Fourth, quotas limit the number of Syrian refugees one company can employ.
And finally, even if all these barriers can be overcome, there’s the overall economic situation. Turkey is currently facing an unemployment rate of 15%, the highest since the 2009 recession.
The role of decentralized identity
Almost all humanitarian organizations, big and small, are scaling up livelihoods programs for skills training, education, and opportunity matching, in an attempt to help as many people as possible overcome these challenges.
But to help people efficiently, these organizations need reliable data. It’s very hard to implement the right programs and services for people if you don’t know anything about them.
In Turkey, the Directorate General of Migration (DGM) is the custodian of all data about the refugee population. But the DGM shares data only at an aggregate level and very reluctantly. The processes are also slow, it can take a UN agency month to get a breakdown of demographics and skills in a certain area.
Therefore, the organizations have started collecting data on a per-project basis. For instance, if UNDP wants to run skills training in a specific town, they first have to find out what needs and skills already exist.
So they will pay a call center to call 5000 people and ask them about their education. Two months later, the ILO runs a project to match specific people from the same town with job opportunities. They will require the same information.
How can they access the UNDP data and avoiding spending money on the same task? All this knowing that data privacy is a huge concern and the DGM does not allow for data being shared between organizations.
We think the solution lies in putting people at the center and in control of their data. Using decentralized identity, every refugee would be able to receive, store, and share data on a digital wallet. They would be in full control, without any other entity being able to access this data without their consent.
In the present example, UNDP could share the data they have collected on peoples’ digital wallets. That is, in addition to keeping a copy for themselves to run their program. Any other organization, like the ILO, could request livelihood data from the collection of beneficiaries’ wallets whenever they need to. This would trigger a notification on the beneficiaries device who can then log into a simple interface to view and answer the share request.
The wallets could also store data from other organizations. This would allow everyone to reach a much bigger population much more quickly:
The road ahead
This last month has been an amazing and humbling learning experience. Especially because it has helped us put our work into context. It became clear that this is a huge problem, and technology will only provide part of the solution. But we also realized that every person counts. And what we’ve seen has encouraged us in our vision to build a human-centered data world. One where individuals are empowered by trusted verifiable data about their identities, skills, and finances. Data, that governments, organizations, and the private sector can use to serve people better.
We are looking forward to the coming weeks and we will be working hard to get one step closer to our vision.
