We are excited to welcome FHI 360 as our newest ID2020 Alliance member!
FHI 360 is a nonprofit human development organization dedicated to improving lives in lasting ways by advancing integrated, locally driven solutions. We recently spoke with FHI 360’s Project Director of Digital Solutions, Troy Etulain, about his organization, their mission, and why they joined the ID2020 Alliance.
Tell me a little about FHI 360’s mission. What are the core values that drive your approach?
We’re an international nonprofit focused on improving the health and wellbeing of people in the U.S. and around the world. We are funded by bilateral donors and foundations to work on creating jobs and improving healthcare quality, testing and medicines. We also do a lot of work in education and humanitarian programs. My particular focus is on leveraging technology in all of these areas so that programs are more impactful, effective, and cost efficient. We do things in new ways for the purpose of increasing the types of impact that we’ve always wanted in the first place.
We have about 4,000 employees who work in the United States and in more than 60 countries. In our work, there are some existing principles that manifest themselves in the ID2020 principles that we espouse as an organization, so there’s tons of philosophical and practical overlap between our missions.
How does digital identity fit within your mandate? How do you see that changing and growing over time?
I think, for us, it fits to the extent that digital identities are about two things: there’s a data management question of responsible data collection, storage and use. And then there’s trying to do more than we can do with our current set of tools. And I guess a third thing is where the world is going with what private sector actors offer consumers with social media or any technology that consumers use, and how identities are increasingly part of people’s lives. So, we already do literally hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of projects where we collect — for the purposes of those projects — personally sensitive data about people. Maybe it’s their HIV status, maybe it’s whether or not they have Malaria — any kind of very sensitive health data. So in the immediate term, we think that digital identities — to the extent that we could use them to help anonymize and protect the people who are a part of our assistance programs — have an immediate potential benefit in helping us be better stewards of individual data for our development and humanitarian programs.
In the longer term, what we are aiming for through this partnership is to play a really big role in inclusion. Inclusion is a very broad topic, but to the extent that digital identities enable individual’s inclusion in society, it plays into the same goals that we have across the board. We’ve conducted biometric programs in the past, in Liberia, Nigeria and other countries, where we helped ministries of education keep track of teacher attendance with a fingerprint scanner. But I feel that, since we’re an organization that has around 70% of its budget coming from health projects, really where it’s going to play a big role is in our health work and, to a lesser but still important extent, our economic growth and humanitarian programs.
Since you began working on digital identity, what has been your biggest “Aha!” moment?
I had to think about that for a little while. I’ve been going at this for a while in terms of trying to build the practice. What came to mind for an “aha” moment was GSMA’s Mobile 360 Series they have every year in Africa. It was in Cape Town in 2016. I was attending an event on digital identity, and in the room there were GSMA representatives, there were multinational organizations, there were people from government, and there were companies — and they were all talking about their plans for making digital identity a reality. And it dawned on me that there’s a very big range of potential players — all coming from their own perspectives — and that digital identity is in such a nascent stage. So with all these different people, with all their different interests in the room, it just struck me that no one knows what direction this is going to go, but you could potentially see some directions where some people lose out — you could see winners and losers essentially. And I think that was a moment when the principles and the ideas of decentralized, interoperable systems — like ID2020 espouses — began to be something that I took an interest in and became concerned about, because you never know who might end up dominating a platform. So I guess the “aha” moment was that this was sort of a free-for-all and we need to push on best principles now, while there’s still time.
Why was it important for you to join the ID2020 Alliance?
We recognize that digital identities are going to be a part of the future of our work, and we recognize that a lot of aspects of the principles, the laws, the systems are still nascent, still early days. And we think that since it’s still early days, we have a chance to be a part of the community that’s thinking hard about trying to figure these things out from an individual rights perspective. We know it’s a part of our future, and we want to be a part of these discussions now so we can participate in a constructive and positive way so that rights are protected, individual privacy is protected, and at the same time, that these systems become user friendly because we’ve worked with you and others on interoperability. And we need to focus on the digital literacy of people whose data may be brought into the system who may not have had as much interaction with communications technology as you or I may have had. So we know it’s a part of our future, and we really want to espouse a collaborative way of working within our community of like-minded organizations. So now is the time. Now is the time to begin collaborating with everybody.
How do you see FHI 360 furthering the mission of the ID2020 Alliance, and how do you hope FHI 360 will evolve through this partnership?
We really feel like we’re in a good position to bring things to scale. We do so many programs in so many countries, that by working with the other Alliance members and identifying solutions that are ready to deploy, we can deploy them at a significant scale that will give them attention and help prove them at a larger scale, such that others are ready to integrate digital identity systems. This is the approach we take elsewhere, and we really feel like we’re in a position to scale solutions.
For the second question, to be perfectly honest, as we go about this we can’t just have five people in the organization doing it. We have to transform mentalities internally about the role digital identity is going to play in our development and humanitarian programs. So there will be an amount of education but also a mentality shift that gets to the symbiotic relationship between the individual and the technology that they’re using. On the idea of individual ownership over one’s data, we may look back on this period of history when so many companies just have our data and use it for free how they want — they buy it and they sell it — as a thing of the past. We think that by practicing what we preach, by engaging with a community externally, by having that be an opportunity to transform mentalities about how to think about technology and development, that that would be of equal importance for our collaboration with ID2020.
Click here for more information on ID2020’s pilot solicitation and evaluation process, as well as our pilot proposal application portal.
(Please note, this interview was edited for clarity and length)
