Civitas ID Wins $500,000 Grant for Open-Source Identity Infrastructure

Civitas ID has received a two-year, $500,000 grant from the Gates Foundation to continue building open-source digital public infrastructure for people who cannot readily prove their identity.

The U.S.-based nonprofit is initially focusing on displaced populations, whose identity documents, employment records and other credentials can be lost, left behind or difficult to verify across borders. Civitas ID says the work is intended to help people reconstruct evidence of their history without creating a separate identity system that isolates them from services in a host country.

The planned infrastructure has three parts. Institutions can issue verifiable digital credentials, individuals can hold and present those credentials through a wallet, and a navigation platform can connect users with services and aid programs for which they may qualify.

Civitas ID is building the system around W3C Verifiable Credentials, decentralized identifiers and open protocols. That design is meant to let different governments, nongovernmental organizations and service providers verify records without being tied to one proprietary platform.

The grant follows the platform’s launch at the United Nations, where Civitas ID presented its approach as credential reconstruction and integration rather than the creation of a parallel refugee identity. The organization now says it has active pilot and partnership work in Colombia and Kenya.

IDEO.org led human-centered design research for the project, working with displaced people and organizations that support them. Civitas ID says that research is shaping the wallet and service-navigation functions, including how people recover records and decide what information to share.

The effort sits alongside other work on portable identity for people who cross borders without reliable documents. UNHCR has also been developing a digital identity wallet for refugees and stateless people, reflecting wider interest in credentials that can be reused beyond a single aid program.

Civitas ID estimates that nearly one billion people face documentation gaps and points to 117.8 million forcibly displaced people as the first population it intends to serve. The grant does not establish a public launch date or enrollment target, but it gives the nonprofit two years of funding to move its open-source architecture and early country partnerships toward operational deployments.

Sources: Civitas ID

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By Cass Kennedy