 All right, we're going to go ahead and get started with our panel discussion today. We're so excited to be here at the Hyperledger Global Forum 2021. We have a great topic today, and our topic is self-sovereign identity for economic empowerment lessons from Africa. Now before we get into the panel discussion, I just want the audience members to know that to the right of their screen they have a chat box and also a Q&A. Please put all your questions for the Q&A portion in the Q&A chat because we will not be monitoring the chat box, but we will be monitoring the Q&A box. So make sure for whatever questions you have for the panelists, they go into the Q&A portion for the Q&A box for us. So that would be great, and thank you all for coming. So without further ado, let's start off with some introductions. I'll go ahead and start. My name is Anna Johnson. I am the Director of Marketing at TRINZIC. I like to describe TRINZIC as the proof of anything platform. So essentially, we make it easy for individuals and organizations to prove things, anything about themselves with technology instead of paper. And so our platform consists of infrastructure and tools that developers can use to easily implement digital trust or software identity into their solutions. So that's a little bit about me, but let's go on to our panelists. We have a great group. We'll start with Fabian and then Brian and then Lohang. Usually in person there's a line, so it makes a little bit more sense. But let me know if you got lost in that order. Just a little bit about yourself, your company, what you do at your company, and then how did you get your start in the self-starving identity space? So Fabian, if you can begin. Yeah, so thanks a lot for allowing me to be on this panel. That's a real pleasure. My name is Fabian Portman. I'm the Chief Technology Officer here at Pharma Connect. Pharma Connect, what do we do? So we're born out of the industry and its needs, in particular in coffee, and that's also where we're currently very active. Yeah, one of our aims is really to sort of empower our clients and the participants to connect farmers, consumers, and everybody in between thanks to the power of data. And so that's a rather broad, I would say it's about supply chains. It's about efficiencies. It's about telling stories, but it's also about people. And of course individuals, and in particular about producers. And it's in the producer end that we're currently at source, that we're currently using SSI technology really to digitally empower producers to play a more active role in these supply chains. So yeah, that's what we do. More details to come later. Hi everyone, I'm Brian Pahn from Kiva. I've been working in identification systems in the global south for last six years, primarily as a researcher and analyst, and then more recently with Kiva. I got started in SSI five years ago at meeting the Evernim folks at the IIW, Internet Identity Workshop. And then after they stood up the Sovereign Foundation, I got involved with the Foundation. It was on the board for a while, helping lead a group interested in ensuring more inclusive solutions being built on the Sovereign Network. Now with Kiva, which is a nonprofit that does loans to individuals around the world. So we have a mission of financial inclusion, and we've built this new infrastructure, we call Kiva Protocol, that helps our government partners add modern digital authentication capabilities to their existing ID systems. So we are not a full stack ID provider or essentially a layer that sits on top and connects to whatever kind of national scale ID system is already in place. And allows private sector or other government actors to connect digitally with that ID system. Great. So my name is Teya Somerset-Marin. I'm currently in Kampala, Uganda, where I live. I'm the CEO and co-founder of the Walla. I started in this space while I did my master's in 2015, focused on decentralized identity. And off that, I connected a team to a hackathon with some core ideas, and that's how the Walla was started. The Walla is focusing on how we can enable the solutions for issue and verification of digital credentials to showcase people's skills, education, and work experience. We then issue skill identity to a person or a business. And we make sure you can basically offer also a solution to identify and verify this talent. Our aim is to advance transparency and enable direct access to diverse and verified talents, specifically from the African continent. We focus specifically on building inclusive technology that's saying that people don't need a smartphone or also offline solutions. And we are currently in six different African countries. Hi, everyone. My name is Luan Spiss, I'm the founder of TADX, a company based in Cape Town, South Africa. My background is in cybersecurity, and like Brian, I actually been in SSI for five years, also met the Evenum guys in 2016 at IW. And since then, I kind of dedicated all my time to SSI, building out proof of concepts for different types of customers in different industry verticals. But what I'm doing now primarily is focusing on building a platform that we call YORMA, together with a lot of consortium partners. And what the platform is all about is really to take youth in Africa. That's where we want to start, but we want to build a platform that is ultimately globally scalable. But the objective is to take youth or provide access for youth in Africa to access to learning opportunities. And as they complete these learning opportunities, they get credentials that actually build up a verifiable CV. And then they can utilize that verifiable CV to get access to employment opportunities. And we basically call it the learning to earning dimension. And then another aspect of YORMA that we are going to focus on is what we call Green YORMA. And Green YORMA is basically how we can utilize youth in Africa as catalysts for sustainable development projects. Great. Thank you all for those introductions. Let's get started with the discussion. So first of all, what is self-siberant identity? For those who are new to SSI, who are learning what it is, Peya, I think it'd be great if you could give an introduction to what it is for those folks. Absolutely. So SSI is self-siberant identity. It's basically a term that's used to describe a digital movement that wants to recognize that an individual should own and control their own identity without the intervening of administrative authorities. SSI aims to allow people to interact basically in the digital world with the same freedom and capacity for trust as they can do in the offline world. And they can do that basically by giving you an access to a digital wallet where you can also identify your own identity and then have the ability to give consent to what kind of data is signed onto your profile or identity and then also using those credentials freely that's been issued to you. In this way, you have more control of your personal information instead of it being spread off in a dozen different databases. Anytime you want to have access to any goods or services without basically risking your identity. Being stolen or hacked. I mean you did a great job with that because a lot of people can't make a nice answer about what is SSI. So that was a job well done. And if anyone has further questions about you know what is self-siberant identity put it in the Q&A and we would love to dive more into that but for you know the conversation today we want to focus really on the implementation of each of the panelists with their SSI project so that will be the focus today. As a follow-up question to what is SSI Brian I would love to hear from you and then as Lohan as well. What are the attributes of SSI that make it a debt to economically empowering people specifically in Africa? Thanks Anna. So we work primarily in the financial services sector right or mission driven organization around financial inclusion. Our partners as stakeholders we engage with tend to be central banks financial regulators other government agencies that work in the sector. And you know they often you know they recognize how quickly especially financial services is changing right with the increase in digitization and they need solutions to help them to help them embrace and take advantage of these changes. But they often come from you know a more traditional ICT view where they're you know they're looking at metrics around you know or what are the kind of operational capabilities of a solution I might implement. What is the cost effectiveness of this solution? How is this going to sit with my legacy systems? What is a what is the ongoing service contract look like right? These are the these are top questions on their mind it's not about hey does your solution offer zero knowledge proofs or how correlatable actually is your solution or you know and so some of those privacy focused issues are lower down the priority list. Some of the user centricity features right like the ability to granular more granularly control information disclosure the ability to essentially have a portable set of records at the individual content. Again those are those are great those are great but those are not driving the conversation right. So but but two I'll just pick out two two parts of our our implementation of SSI that our value is the ability to have P2P connections right the ability for one a verifier to to verify or authenticate a credential directly without having to phone home as they say right to go back to the trusted third source that third party source especially because of what that enables in terms of an offline environment right so that is a that is a feature that that does have value I would say even more so for for many of the conversations that we having is the ability to support multiple issuers without having to harmonize or sync those databases right so when we're talking with a government partner and they have maybe a foundational a foundational national ID right and then we start we we see the wallet with that ID oh now they want to look at layering in a social benefits program right and so they have maybe multiple social benefits programs with different eligibility lists right and typically you have to go through this you know the honoris deduplication blah blah blah syncing harmonization of those databases the ability to support multiple issuers without having to do that has of course huge operational benefits that are very attractive to many of our stakeholders Brian Lohan would you like to add um okay so I have a slightly different view um about things that I feel will really make a massive impact from economic empowerment perspective um for me it is really if you look at Africa there are so many people in Africa that have no form of identity there is not even a national identity um and for me the idea of verifiable credentials and being able to build up a profile or in theory and identity about yourself from all kinds of things that you interact with for me that is really a game changer because first of all it's provable data you can once you receive these credentials or whatever format from whichever issue it might be you can at some point go to a financial institution say hey I don't have a national ID but you know I have this list of all these verifiable credentials and all of them kind of correlate to the fact that it's really me so I think for me one of the key things about self-identity is really to be able to take people that have no form of identity and build it up from scratch and to a point where you can actually become economically um part of the economic um system and get economic empowered by actually having this identity that you can utilize to do all kinds of things the other thing for me that is very important which I believe is going to be a major game change going forward is the ability to actually take these credentials and take it with you everywhere cross-border if I today if I'm in Africa today and I want to go and work in Zimbabwe tomorrow I can take my identity I can take my credentials and I can prove to them just and according to the same rigor in ZIM I can prove that it is still me so for me it is really to build it up right from the ground level and then to to take that identity wherever you go and for that identity to ultimately be able to unlock for you economic empowerment access to learning access to all kind of different services that you might not have had access to before great I love those two different perspectives it's great to hear about those and now for the audience I think it'd be great that everyone understands a little bit more about your individual projects some of you addressed it a little bit in your intros but just to go more into depth about how you are implementing SSI what is your case and how is it economically empowering people in Africa and so we'll just go for each of you on Fabian you can start and then Brian and LaHonza thanks so yeah as I mentioned before we're really very active in coffee and I think sort of we're coming in also from a supply chain angle coffee product traceability is really really important for us and I think the clients that we work with they realize that there's a real need essentially to transport information the things that are happening at the very beginning of the supply chain when you essentially source coffee all the way through this supply chain particularly in the end also to the consumer and data that is relevant there is often revolving around individuals right because these are you know the producers that grow the coffee that harvest it that process it sort of what's going on so the producers really put into focus at source and I think LaHonza really raised a really good point in many cases you know there's a real lack of identity and in particular also digital identity and there's of course one way you know one can say there's a lot of data already being gathered about producers and their practices but that's essentially in some cases also due to technological barriers or process barriers that's a one-way street and the producer is not really put into focus or not put in control essentially how their data about about them about their practices is being shared and in particular sort of we really want we saw a great opportunity with SSI to use SSI technology really to build such a digital identity in a particular so yeah a more you know not just identity I think identity here is really a digital profile what what kind of who are who are you what kind of economic activity are you engaging in because yeah you are you are producing great coffee you're selling that potentially at a very good price but what kind of you know what kind of digital proof do you have for that and also other activity that you're engaging are you a member of a training program have you received a certain piece of education are you are you conducting you know your agricultural practice in a certain way and that information can really be centralized around around the producer and put the the producer in the driving seat about sharing that information throughout throughout the supply chain it's not just so to say like data harvesting but really empowering the individual and I think that's that's that's what we're trying to do with with with our activity or our solution at source to create this this this digital inclusion for the producer and essentially trying to put them more into the driving seat saying hey you know this is information that is about me and I can control how I share that and then you know many of the the great things that have been said like for example with Brian as well you know building building a building a track record in terms of in terms of financing right if you're if you're growing good coffee selling that at a good price it would be great if if if you could get a you know for example a transaction receipt that you sold that coffee into your digital wallet and start building essentially that transaction history or that transaction record saying hey I'm doing great work over you know consistent work over a certain period of time and that's potentially going to allow me to get to get better financing and that's that's sort of I think that this is in particular what we're trying to achieve and try to work with with our partners to be very clear we we're a technology company and essentially we're trying to stand up this ecosystem so we are not not boots on the ground so we're heavily relying on on our partners in country for example in Rwanda we work we were closely with one of our partners who has a very strong footprint of origin and yeah that's sort of we we we are essentially providing the digital technology and because the relationships with with the you know both between us because we're born out of the industry but also between our partners and producers are very strong so this is something that we can leverage or try to leverage to to create adoption so if you want to summarize it's really putting you know it there's a real need to to create you know to to to create a mechanism to to share data about what's happening at source throughout the supply chain and one way to do it would just be to harvest this data and the other way would be to actively involve producers at source in a digital way so so that they become you know they have a more active role more inclusive role so ultimately in the end you know create opportunities opportunities for growth and yeah essentially more a more sustainable way of doing business for them to grow their business as well and of course there's I think there's going to be a question around that later sort of you know what kind of this is of by by no means by no means easy I think all the participants on the panel can tell their story you know creating adoption on on any sorts of corner is is is a is a really a real a real piece of work so we we have a an active pilot in Sierra Leone it's the first implementation of of Kiever protocol where we worked with the national ID agency they had just gone undergone and modernization of the national ID which included biometrics fingerprints and then they use Kiever protocol to essentially enable digital authentication capabilities on top of that ID system right so created wallets for every holder of the national ID which now allows those individuals to walk into a participating financial service provider a bank or an MFI MFI microfinance institution and use the you know their their their fingerprint to authenticate themselves satisfy KYC requirements and and open the bank account and so this kind of this use case of EKYC is is typically the the core use case we start with then we can do other things like credit or financial reporting on top of that GDB payments and and so on but it a few things I just want to to emphasize again as I said earlier we do not create any ID credentials right we rely on existing government credentials just digitize those create digital versions of those to put in the wallet and and you know and maybe in contrast to some of my colleagues on the call right our focus really is yes this this this has benefits for the individual right but we are not we are not creating new IDs for anyone who does not currently have one right that's a problem that we believe is best solved by the state and that is outside the scope of what we can do and you say okay well if they've already got an ID and you create a digital version how you actually you know improving the economics as you say and what does that lead to better economic outcomes for these individuals it's really looking at the supply side in the financial sector right and from the perspective of a financial service provider if I have to go through a manual or traditional onboarding process where I'm I'm looking at your documentation I'm going in the back room I'm making photocopies I have to worry about the fraud potential for fraud for that card or that whatever it may be that fiscal artifact right we essentially take that off the table so we dramatically lower the cost the operational cost of serving the customer we lower the risk and the compliance needs for serving that customer right and by doing that you open the aperture for the financial service provider open the aperture of the the scope of the population that they're willing to serve right so that very those very low income individuals who the bank is never going to make money on right if they if they if it costs the bank a lot of money to open an account for them they just say no and so right so with kiva protocol right we dramatically lower cost lower risk and increase the population that can be properly served by financial services providers guess it's my turn uh so yeah we we focused on issuance of credentials we have about over 30 39 different organizations that issue these credentials to talk about a concrete use case it would be the stand big business incubator which has issued 2000 small to medium sized businesses all over uh Uganda what happens is basically they go through business training and they're issued very different kind of digital credentials basically to uh to their business as a part of it both as a business but also as an individual uh what happens then is that we can take you one of them is like a pharmacy and they actually need that for both compliance when they have government checkup so the government has been there and then scan the QR code of the the certificate being there both on their phone or on on the wall that everybody put the certification on the wall here um and then they can scan that and verify the authenticity of it in the same way we work with then different actors and that basically see this training as an access to basically de-risk access to capital for businesses so in this way you can actually you see that you have things in order in the same way Brian said like you will have like a national ID you have you have a tax number all these things to make sure you become more compliant and we work with all these other organizations to enable you to have those so you can get an opportunity to just to start small but like grow your business and then also being able to be recognized not just locally where you are but anywhere we are as a part of that if you don't have a smartphone we build a custody approach so you can decide you get signed up with a number and um with a name and number and a password that's the whole password issue we do have in the space that you need to remember that password but at least then when you have access to a smartphone you can also have the same functionality um in the app with the duola app or some in the same way so that's one concrete way we're working to do it um and we're also working in the same way with the government here for testing uh when they do app-to-do test of teachers so in this thing we're trying to recruit and then we're trying to basically also verify all through their systems so it's a faster way to basically verify um who has actually gone through their system even from a government perspective because like Brian mentioned having there's a high risk of things not being authentic in that it's fraudulent and this gives all access basically all actors in the equal space a safer way to to build trust so uh yuma is the project that we are developing and yuma basically stands for youth agency marketplace so the whole system is built around the idea of giving youth ultimate agency not only over themselves but over their data and what they do the associated data but what yuma provides to the youth in africa is um we provide the youth that don't necessarily have access to opportunities with the ability to log into yuma or create an account on yuma then get access to exposed opportunities like i mentioned this can be experiential learning it can be like learning management type courses it can be sustainable development type of initiatives opportunities and as they complete um well complete these opportunities they get verifiable credentials issued to them and in some cases they also get rewarded we incentivize them for completing and as i build up the digital cv the objective is then for them to be able to access earning opportunities so utilizing that cv to basically prove the skill set that they build up to get access to either direct employment or any kind of employment and that is what we refer to as learning to earning kind of dimension of the platform so far we have we launched in july 2020 at the moment we have 26 000 users on the platform and it just organically grows day by day we distributed about 120 000 dollars worth of incentives to the youth to complete these challenges and what we also want to do in one of the key things that we want to build in the platform is what we call privacy preserving machine learning so that the youth can actually start getting access to a customized learning path because a lot of times they don't necessarily know where to start or how to actually start educating themselves so basically taking the input of where they want to end and then provide these customized learning paths without compromising the privacy of the data and then the other side of the the machine learning capability is then for the youth to be automatically matched against employment opportunities so instead of logging in and being bombarded with a thousand or 10 000 types of employment opportunities we basically take their skill set and match it to what the employer wants and then we basically tell them you know these are five opportunities in your region that you can participate in and one of the other dimensions that we want to do in YORMA is what we want to build a green YORMA it's the same kind of platform the same marketplace but we want to focus on the sustainable development side and the objective is how can we utilize the youth as catalysts to achieve impact at scale so the idea would be that we can create all kinds of impact sustainable development projects you can invest in those projects and then we get the youth to do the work and also you can then even go and do the monitoring and evaluation to ultimately prove the outcomes of those projects but our objective is really to reach an enormous amount of youth our aim is to reach one and a half million youth by the end of the year we'll see how far we get to that but really our objective is to not only provide them with identities but having the ability to control those identities completely and then to for them utilize those identities to really uplift themselves out of whatever conditions they might be and providing them the access and then the last thing is from an incentive perspective we incentivize the youth because a lot of times they don't have access to data so let's say they go participate in an opportunity and they utilize 100 megs of data now they basically don't necessarily have money to buy another 100 megs so we give them an incentive and then we have marketplaces where they can go and buy electricity, airtime, data and depending on the country we have different marketplaces in different countries but yeah that's that's Yoma and yeah we have quite ambitious objectives and yeah it's taking day by day. That's fantastic and great to hear about my next question has to do I mean Fabian alluded to this a little bit I want to talk about the adoption challenges you all have been facing when implementing your solution in Africa and these challenges range from governance, technical challenges, social business challenges so I want to hear the whole thing. Brian do you want to start us off on what challenges Kima has been experiencing with adoption? Yeah sure so I and maybe this is my personal bias because I'm not a technologist and I know I know we're at a technology conference or event but you know the in my experience the technology is usually not the hardest part right these are complex problems that we're trying to solve and you may have a better mouse trap and I think probably all of us believe we have a fundamentally better mouse trap that doesn't mean that you know you can you can see the change that you would expect just by virtue of the the capabilities of the tech. So the enabling environment policy is huge for us working in the financial services sector right so we have to ensure you know not only does the regulatory environment have the you know right kind of like data protection and privacy controls in place but more specifically for the use case I was describing before EKYC you know do the KYC regs support electronic channels digital channels for this kind of verification right and the timelines for for for making policy changes are hard to estimate maybe even harder than estimating software development timelines because these are these are complicated issues right it's not you often have multiple stakeholders not just your government partners but right they're working with TA providers technical assistance providers there's probably multilaterals involved the bank is involved or maybe the IFC is involved and there may be multiple levels of jurisdiction right maybe there's a subnational like reach subnational as well as national policy supernational right FATIF right the international organization that regulates all these kind of customer due diligence due diligence regulations so you know coordinating all of that and and and really being able to ensure those pieces are in place before you're ready to launch is a critical and and and maybe the most difficult part of implementations for us that makes sense maybe and would you like to add to this question yeah no no I can agree with Brian I think this is a this is a very very big aspect of it like especially if you're trying to to stand this up trying to do this at scale right now sort of also where do you start who do you involve I would say we're in somewhat in in a fortunate position that essentially on the issuer end we we work with with partners and we're in that sense if we're looking at supply chain traceability and harvesting that that information and trying to put essentially the the producer in the deriving seat there where governance is not is is not the only challenge we we I mean as I said right it's very very complex but but also essentially end user adoption has been has been very um yeah has been has been a lot a lot of work and and sort of the obstacles there or literacy access to network um they mentioned in the beginning you have to create really sort of technologically inclusive solutions right because you're going to encounter some of these obstacles like you know you're expecting like smartphone capabilities maybe or access to to sell your network it's not happening um you know simply replying to an sms can sometimes be a can sometimes be a channel you have to look for signal um you know when you're when you're using these digital channels as Lowen mentioned you might suddenly run out of run out of credit um and you know these are all small aspects that are that are essentially you know creating small frictions and and when when trying to roll this out and essentially trying to do this at scale so um we're very very heavily reliant on on on local partners education and incentivation for us is a is a big part like why should you do this why should you participate in these kinds of programs very clear articulation of value for for producers is something that that that takes a lot of of work you know funnily enough for example for coffee producers when you would want them when it's coffee delivery time they're very very busy obviously um you know coffee harvesting and delivery happens in a you know in certain periods of time of the year and then you're coming in here and and trying to roll out this additional solution and and you have to be very articulate like why should you participate in this what's in it for you um for them to do on top of the very hard work that they're doing to go the extra mile and participate in such a program and that's um that's that's uh that's something that we have to work uh very very hard with with our local partners you know we're talking about e-vouchers um essentially because you're asking for for an extra an extra step potentially verifying information or you know signing up and getting their digital ID and and and you know we we work with with our partners essentially that we say look we're trying to make this really sort of uh we're trying to get you to to to join this program but there's something in it for you as well can be you know digital e-vouchers where where you can get um for example uh agriculture products or or whatnot so to really create that traction and incentivation for for for producers to to participate and for them also to see the value and and you know now given of course there's you know additional complexities people can't eat meat is is easily um you know you cannot just do trainings on the fly like this um and and this is of course fully understandable right but then things also slow down a little bit um it's it's um there's many dimensions I would say it's as as Brian says it's it's very very very very complex and then of course if you think about ecosystem wise sort of mention at the very very beginning also sort of the beautiful example of low and you know if you're trying to take it essentially outside of pharma connect or pharma connect primary partners if you're trying to create traction on on the verifier side so to say um you know pack your digital wallet walk somewhere else and do something else with it um coordinating that side as well I mean this is uh is a gigantic amount of work definitely a multifaceted problem as you both said uh yeah would you like to wrap up this question by adding your thoughts for sure thank you absolutely so I think first uh onboarding it's in 0101 on my end where we need to understand that we're in an area where people do not have you cannot use if you cannot use the phone number or people don't have an email you don't have an onboarding every single thing you're trying to onboarding to it's not working so that comes into what Fabian mentioned also in terms of education and digital literacy is it depends where you are but if you're going in more remote areas uh you are in uh you maybe having we're having use case we have a 12 000 teachers that's going in a hall to take an aptitude test none of them have an email uh or some have if they're able to use it or not or if they're going even to going to reuse it but that's the core component that's going to help them when they go into the e-recruitment system that's just been built but because the e-recruitment system has been built only solo on email and phone number you know you don't have an identifier at the bottom which we can trust and that's why also Loan mentioned that's that's the ground level we need to also think about and have different ways of solving how we onboard and how we work in partnerships on digital literacy to make sure people understand what this means beyond other kind of solutions that they're using because they use phones for mobile money all those different things but not for these use cases which comes into more human-centered design perspectives you know we need to design for what's already here and deeply passionate about that not building systems for whatever we've been doing if it's in already or the US whatever it is it needs to be built for the African continent and then in with with Africans and with local collaborations at the ground level because that's it should work for here and and that's the core core principle I think that a lot of people forget um and I see a lot of system being built in that way and specifically if you have a lot of money to build these systems which startups that generally don't we scrap on our budgets please think about those action points you know to understand how we can pool in funding to really enable that core because that's that's how we actually empower the majority of people who are inclusive of the economy as a whole and we don't leave people behind which should be core principle in terms of the digital economy thank you we're just going to switch gears a little bit now since we're at a hyperledger global forum I figured it would be a good idea to talk about hyper hyperledger projects and what hyperledger projects you all are using in your solution so I'm going to direct this question at Lohan and then Fabian to follow what are the advantages of using the hyperledger indie and aries project and then also what is still lacking from those projects that that is needed for your your your solution and so I would like to hear both of those what are the advantages and then also what would you like to see the community work on in those projects to you know make them better yeah sure so I mean for us it's pretty simple I think hyperledger indie is really a robust solid piece of technology the solar foundation of a main ledger is running for four odd years it provides all the capabilities at this stage what we need over and above so we have extra kind of requirements that in future um indie might not meet all of it but we decided to kind of build on hyperledger indie and then of course aries as well and to combine allows you to build out trust ecosystems once you kind of go over the complexity of the technology you can build out trust ecosystems fairly easy um but those are the main the main reasons why we chose indian aries at this stage and also of course um about the governance um I think the governance is clear and it's it's a very good model to support the technology um but when it then comes to what's missing um for me and for most of the people on the pool I I think you've heard that all the other panelists had the same kind of um frustrations or issues in adoption of ssi and aprica and I think aprica is unique in the sense that we just have unique problems um so for me one of the key things that I would like to see more focus on when it comes to um indie areas is really the ability to focus more on low tech or no tech basically offline low tech use cases because if you look at ssi at the moment and what people are building by far the most use cases being built out today goes with the assumption that someone will have a small turn they will have data and they know how to use a small turn the reality in africa is very far from that um you have a group that do have the capability but the people that we want to reach don't have it some of them don't even have a phone um so I would like to see more energy and effort being put into the um low tech notic part of ssi another unique requirement that that we have is when we started building yoma and looking at the digital literacy and the smart phone penetration the lack of access to data we couldn't just start off and build it in a true ssi form meaning the edge device basically holds the wallet and they will interact with agents so we kind of had to and it took me a long time to actually just accept the fact that we can't do full ssi um and at some point I thought you know what I I'll just call it a stepping block um or a stepping stone and what we had to do is we can we kind of had to break the principle of ssi degree um by providing custodial services and that will kind of go forward in providing guardianship services because the person without a smartphone um he's not going to be able to participate in a full ssi ecosystem you need to provide different pieces of technology to bring him into the ecosystem and empower him getting part of the economic system and at some point he will migrate by himself out of the kind of custodial model or friendship model into a full ssi model and then um another key piece that I feel highly personal and as strong about is I feel we should have more open source technology because at the end of the day um we are so early in the game if everybody is building proprietary technology and effectively building a lot of the same technology that is competing whether competing with each other it's all great but I believe we will drive adoption and move forward faster when we have more open source technology stacks that people can utilize so effectively take the complexity of technology and drive it down as far as you can so that people can start focusing on use cases um and for me those are the the primary things and then with YORMA we have another key requirement that is not kind of part of Hyperledge in the areas at all at this stage and we need tokens it's just how our ecosystem works we need tokens to incentivize people we need tokens to for them to be able to do peer-to-peer exchanges to purchase services or products and it's not that I'm saying we need it in indie areas it's just that we have a unique requirement so what what is happening is what I foresee happening in YORMA is we will most probably have multiple DID methods at the end of the day and each DID method will bring its own capabilities and we will basically allow you to choose and interact between these DID methods to fulfill the use case that they might be busy with within the YORMA ecosystem but for me those are the primary ones and then one that we cannot overlook is education digital literacy I feel it is um really uh what's the correct word here but irresponsible to expect someone that don't even understand digital literacy and suddenly you put a phone in his hand you say no don't lose this thing because if you're to lose it you basically need to start from scratch um so for us to really drive adoption of SSI we need to get the people to understand what what is the actual meaning behind self sovereign identity and what does it actually mean to be user-centric self sovereign and what are the roles and the responsibilities that actually now fall on top of you we previously some other party that you trusted um would have handled for you because we removed that trusted intermediary and we now have the ledgers to do that for us but now suddenly we just expect people to understand what it means and for me I completely this um I'm not dealing with that I think there's an enormous amount of education and literacy that will need to happen for people to really understand what it means and what the power is or the thing that they have in their hand when it comes to SSI great thanks Lohan and same question to you Fabian what are the advantages of using the Hyperledger Indian Aries projects and then what would you like to see the community work on within those projects I can only second many of the things that Lohan said this is I mean you know Hyperledger Aries in the fantastic work this gave us really sort of you know a good solid ground to start from and tremendously grateful to the open source community for standing this up but many of the I think especially for us it's on this panel I think we're really experiencing similar pains just in the areas that we that we operate yeah as Lohan outlined that you can't expect smartphones and sort of every edge device is a smartphone that's the way it's going to be and for us I think it was very clear simply just working in coffee having looked at the at the conditions that though or the areas that we're going to be working in a source this is this is not this is not this is going to be very very difficult simply just having a I would say a flip phone with with with text capabilities is is already a lot is a lot and that's just one that's just the technological dimension so to say I think that's that's why that would let us to we realized very early on that there's going to be a stepping stone as I think as Lohan described it right to essentially go more to the if I can call it a truer picture of SSI where where where things are really stored and on one device but it's both technologically and education wise right it's it's it's really these two dimensions work very very closely together and that's that's why we also partnered with with with Trinsic and Trinsic helped us a lot here really to create that stepping stone and that's also what we're primarily using with our partners in our projects that are currently live in in Africa which is ultimately yeah it's it's not fully true to to SSI because we cannot use smart phones it's not on device storage it's more in in in the direction of custodianship or a cloud a cloud based wallet and the interaction really happens through through through an SMS or a flip phone so to say the producers interact with their wallet or parts of the functionality of of of the system through SMS and then through periodical cycles you can you can interact maybe if you're at an internet cafe or something you can log in with with the help of of that text or SMS phone and and that's sort of that reality that that there needs to be a stepping stone both technologically and and also a lot of material available in terms of education what does this mean now and that there you know it cannot just go from zero to 100 but this is you know it's already trouble onboarding technological means are not available we need to take that stepping stone then education as low and says slowly transition people into this yeah ultimately really where where you really enable right you have everything on your smartphone device I mean we always say like we we we would we would be we would be wanting to bring everybody to the smartphone device if through our technology you could actually get a smartphone that would be phenomenal right but just sort of get there you need to you need to have that stepping stone if there's focus on on that area as well I think that would be you know highly appreciated for us and everything that's also on top we have high ambitions we really want to we really want to roll this out globally we want to make this work globally connect as many people as possible anything any work that's done in terms of scalability being able to to release the mass onboard and have a lot of interactions through through through that platform or through that technology is of course always appreciated thank you both we're going to end with one last question before we get to the q and a because we already have a good amount of questions there so I want to make sure we get to them so this is just a wrap up question feel free to make it brief so we can get to the q and a and we'll just go through all four of you what I mean what do you see as the future of ssi in africa what will help us get there and so baby and we're going to go right back to you and then we'll go to Brian paya and then we'll we'll go to q and a right um yeah so for the future I think for us it's really instead of working with the working working with the current I would say inter stepping stone or a solution trying to create that scale essentially triggering the transition um and and for us the the key the key element of that at least in in our ecosystem or the area where we work is is really is as they mentioned is is onboarding is is is very very clearly sort of trying to create that scale and also clearly articulate and value proposition for for for the end user for the for the producers how can we we convince you to to do that extra step and and again sort of collaboration with partners and potentially also for us to say clearly looking beyond supply chain I think it's going to be it's going to be very very important right this is not just the supply chain use case where we essentially yeah trying to make make sure that we can include the the producers to take a more active role in when we're talking about traceability and potentially transparency of of coffee supply chains but that it can be larger it can be beyond supply chain it's really the focus on the producer at origin that this can include education all the great work that Dan Lohan are doing um and and you know everything in the direction of of financing that that Brian is doing that this really becomes a tool um yeah I think that that for for with it with a broader with a broader purposes and essentially connecting these dimensions I think that would be something that we're we're we would be really loving to see and I think also um want to put want to put an effort behind I'll go very brief for you Anna one word fragmentation let's breathe yeah uh I'll go brief but not that brief uh I think the future versus I is collaboration I do hope that we all need to work together in the same way Lohan talked about in terms of building the standards building open source and understanding how we actually enable this ecosystem to work um and the and that's across the whole sector that's talking about digital literacy that's working on the onboarding that's enabling in uh working with governments you know and and fundamentally I hope that um I that it's taken over by each individual country uh having over African ownership uh being built in that way so it's it's it's not a same presence I hope it's not a western dominated SSI coming over to do implement solutions over here uh deeply uh don't want that uh and the way that build is just like adding I hope we just like work forward with humility uh to to enable um different more opportunities for for people so I think that's that's it's not what it will do it hopefully will like what it will enable uh and I think the core component of that in any way is that we work together and we understand how we work greatly together leaving ego aside and uh just talk and really really building for for what what it can be um that's that's me I'll also keep it very brief so my what do I envision I would like to see SSI being adopted broadly in whatever form or fashion be giving people the ability to start utilizing verifiable credentials to unlock um all kinds of access to different services or rights or economic um participation and what will get us they start building not doing something I think just sitting around will get us nowhere um the reason why we are able to understand all the pitfalls and the the difficulties in doing the stuff in Africa is because we're doing it we need to get more people doing it and at the same time like they said collaboration thank you all let's go ahead and dive into the Q&A our first question is for Brian it says Brian can you talk a little bit about the success of Kiva's identity project in Sierra Leone? Yeah real quickly we got uh all the way to uh uh the final testing of the production system uh all all live um uh kind of service providers integrated when COVID hit uh we essentially had to halt or pause the project um and then now we're uh talking with our our government partners about how we want to revive or restart it um you know we have some travel restrictions for our team in place still so it's a little bit of uh trying to navigate the fallout from the pandemic um but those conversations are ongoing and we're excited to get back into it great thank you I'm going to go ahead and go to the question since I had two upvotes um it says smartphones email accounts demonic seeds can all be lost are biometrics a viable path towards generating private keys are any of your projects using these so anyone can take this feel free to unmute you go for it we only have about one minute left so I think Brian take it because he's the only one I'm not we're not using biometrics but uh yeah I don't think I think it is far fetched to expect um as at this stage utilize biometrics to create the private key I don't think it is accurate enough to actually make it feasible they yeah so it is for me that's actually seal of any blockchain type system is private image and it's something to be solved I don't think anyone saw it very elegantly as yeah great um I think with that I apologize we weren't able to get to all the q&a but I know that all the panelists here are available you can reach out to them in multiple ways I'm sure by reaching out to their companies or hopefully you know some of them personally who are here um in attendance you can reach out to them to get your questions answered um I want to thank everyone for coming and participating and I also want to thank our panelists especially for their time and their preparation for this event today and I hope everyone has a great day thank you Anna thank you everyone thank you thank you so much everyone yeah and uh we'll have an amazing day I hope to chat and collaborate soon people bye