Is decentralized identification an effective aid to refugees and displaced people in Thailand/Myanmar?
According to UN Refugee Agency (“UNHCR”), refugees are people who have been forced to flee their home country because of persecution, war or violence. They are not the same as displaced people, while the later refers to those have been forced to flee their home but never cross an international border. Unlike refugees, displaced people are not protected by international law or eligible to receive many types of aid because they are legally under the protection of their own government.
Refugees and displaced people are usually stateless, which means they are not citizens of any country. The UNHCR estimates there are at least 480,000 stateless people live in Thailand, though the actual number could be as high as 3 million.
Humanitarian assistance to Thai-Myanmar border refugees is plunging
Myanmarese refugees have been surviving in Thai-Myanmar border for the last three decades on the provision of international donors and community-based organizations. However, since 2011, international governments and donors have been significantly cutting humanitarian assistance in refugee camps at Thai-Myanmar border. Social finance around the globe has been turning its attention to central Myanmar, where social, economic and political needs are more attractive.
“It is always a challenge to raise funds for food aid for them where the needs are chronic but not life-threatening,” said Duncan MacArthur, Myanmar Program Director at The Border Consortium (“TBC”).
TBC has been the only provider of food and shelter to all nine refugee camps along the border for the last 20 years, and now funding to TBC was dropped by nearly 50% between 2012 and 2018.
This forced the association to reduce food rations and stop the provision of all non-food items even to new arrivals. In 2012, TBC deployed a targeting strategy to only provide food rations to families who are classified as “most vulnerable” and “vulnerable”. Still the “most vulnerable” receive only 13.5 kilograms of rice, which is below the standard of 15 kilograms received by all refugees in 2010.
“Our family cannot survive on the current rations. I need to break camp rules by sneaking out at night to forage for frogs and vegetables to help feed my wife and 4 children.” a Mae La Refugee Camp resident said. “I have to illegally work outside the camp as a day labor. But when I am not at home during the TBC’s household visits and surveys, my rations can be cancelled.”
Perhaps the intention of households surveys is not to kick refugees out of monthly rations, but such ad hoc documentation process does help justify the humanitarian assistance cuts. Refugees and forced migrants said it is becoming increasingly difficult to survive in camps, and they feel “being forced to return to Myanmar”.
Spontaneous return to Myanmar
Over the past few years, around 10,000–15,000 refugees have returned to Myanmar in so called spontaneous returns. The UNHCR has been targeting 45,000 refugees, nearly half the camp population, to return to Myanmar through “Voluntary Repatriation Centers (VRCs)”.
Upon repatriation, refugees would receive official documentation from the Burmese government, while forfeiting her or his refugee status.
“I think the VRCs and ration cuts are signs that aid and government agencies want to push refugees to return,” a Mae La Refugee camp official Tu Kee said.
Overall, refugee camps household surveys can justify funding cuts by classifying refugees into different vulnerability statuses, showing population decrease, and possibly even proving trends of voluntary repatriation. In this case, all of the data collected through households surveys do not or only partially reflect the reality of needs in refugee camps. Most household data are used to justify instead of inform funding decisions.
Decentralized identification and collection of data
In order to ensure the neutrality and authenticity of household data in refugee camps, it is critical to provide decentralized identification (“DID”) to all camp residents regardless of their refugee and residency statuses.
With a decentralized digital identity, every single resident can contribute their personal and household data in real-time or near real-time, with data ownership and sovereignty, hence creating more updated and reliable data than those collected from ad-hoc household surveys.
On top of that, refugees can digitally participate in crowdsourcing individual and social needs, cross-validating these needs, and collectively producing needs-claims in donor meetings.
Through DID technology, refugees and related stakeholders can help international governments and donors to understand the diversity and complexity of need beyond those portrayed in donor’s reports. Such data collection and validation across camp populations becomes a form of problem identification due diligence by consensus that helps to bring more funding to TBC and other organisations at the Thai-Myanmar border.
“Consensus Due Diligence” may also help international donors to set up new charity mandate with TBC according to the nuanced social needs claimed by camp residents. Besides, such mandate can be a pay-for-success smart contract that help international donors to ensure every single dollar is targeted at each desperate need.
Rights to access, use, own and trade personal data
In order to prevent further data exploitation of the stateless and marginalized, it is important to recognize the data contributors and validators as digital assets holders who have the immutable rights to access, use, own and trade their data.
This means translating the data validated by refugees and ethnic minorities into valuable digital assets, ie. cryptographic tokens, or io2 tokens, which can in turn be traded for their access to basic needs including food and data infrastructure like satellite dishes, prepaid SIM cards and other telecom services. “We purchase a new SIM card each month, because each time we buy it, we get to enjoy certain amount of free data usage specifically for Facebook and Messenger,” said by a Mae La Refugee Camp resident.
As people’s supply of personal data is directly related to their demand for mobile data plans, tokens economics that facilitate the exchange of data contribution with mobile data plans can further incentivize more people to participate in crowdsourcing and cross-validating social problems and needs, hence contributing to more timely humanitarian aid deployment.
More content on DID will be published soon. Join our Telegram group (https://t.me/io2_impact_oxygen) to share your thoughts and questions about DID. If you want to know more details about our Myanmar project, feel free to contact iO2 Foundation:
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More about Impact Oxygen Foundation (iO2)
Impact Oxygen Foundation, iO2, is a decentralized autonomous organization for crowd-enhanced impact investment on the blockchain, underpinned by iO2 Token which incentivizes the communities to provide trusted data for impact measurement. Since 2015, the iO2 team has successfully developed and executed over a dozen social impact projects in China via its service platform named “ShanZhai City” (shanzhaicity.com), and now are engaging blockchain-based projects in Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Brazil.
Read More:
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- ANNOUNCEMENT : iO2 and ixo sign strategic partnership to revolutionise social finance infrastructure
- The integration of technologies will unlock impact data from grassroots communities
- Blockchain & Impact Investing: Why We Need Blockchain for Social Finance and Social Development — the System of Bilateral Trust
