Kenyans in marginalized communities have been urged to adopt the use of digital IDs to help with identification during cash humanitarian assistance.
According to Fredrick Orimba, Focal Point for Cash and Voucher (CVA) officer of Kenya Red Cross (KRC), digital identification will help vulnerable people access humanitarian assistance without leaving others behind.
“The KRC has come up with a pilot project to try and work around digital identification to ensure that everyone can access humanitarian assistance,” he said.
In a press release, the Kenya Red Cross Society (KRC) said significant global attention has centred on the role of cash transfers in bringing efficiency to the humanitarian system and improving outcomes for crisis-affected populations.
A challenge in providing humanitarian aid is the risk of leaving behind people with no official forms of identification, which are typically required to ensure assistance goes to the right people.
The provision of humanitarian cash assistance through financial service providers such as banks or mobile money may have stricter requirements to show proof of legal identity (e.g., national ID card) as it’s required by law.
According to the Kenya Red Cross Society (KRC), an estimated over 25 per cent of people they seek to help have no official ID hence making it hard to access certain services where identification is required.
Mathare Chief Rose Ayiere said that Mathare residents were largely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic and lost their jobs.
Without identification, it is hard to give assistance to the residents.
“Most people used to do casual work in Eastleigh but when Covid-19 struck, nobody could allow any woman to clean up their houses because they feared the disease and most of the people came back to the estate with nothing to eat,” she said.
In May 2001 KRC and IFRC with the support of the Dignified Identities in Cash Assistance (DIGID) Consortium piloted the use of digital ID for cash assistance in Mathare and Turkana as part of its response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The process begins with volunteers registering people using mobile phones, and then the KRC cleans up and approves the data in the Red Cross data management platform. Finally, the identity technology provider gravity receives the request and creates a digital wallet and credentials.
The user is verified and receives their unique QR code; if they have their own phones they can store and access their QR code themselves and those that do not have their own phones receive a printed QR code instead.
They use their QR code to prove their identity and obtain a token to receive cash and finally they present their token to the money distributor to obtain cash.
