Integrated Biometrics Provides Fingerprint Scanners for Humanitarian Efforts in Yemen

Integrated Biometrics (IB) has teamed up with Prodigy Systems to facilitate the distribution of food and other resources to refugees in Yemen. Prodigy Systems is based in the country’s capital city of Sana’a, and was asked to create a national registration and authentication system to ensure that humanitarian aid is distributed fairly.

To that end, the system uses IB’s Five-0 ten print fingerprint scanner to verify the identities of heads of households and other adult family members. The mobile system is able to function in remote areas of the country with limited infrastructure.

“We are honored to be part of an endeavor that will save the lives of so many of our fellow citizens,” said Prodigy Systems CEO Adnan Al-Harazi. “Our team will enroll more than a million Yemenis in as many as 75,000 different locations with little or no reliable network.”

The humanitarian crisis in Yemen is the result of widespread war and famine within the country. The United Nations has reported that more than 75 percent of the population is currently in need of food or some other form of humanitarian aid, a figure that corresponds to roughly 24 million people. Unfortunately, Yemen did not have a pre-existing national ID database, which made it more difficult to distribute relief due to the number of criminals that tried to exploit the system for monetary gain.

The rugged Five-0 scanners should help mitigate that problem, allowing food and resources to reach the intended beneficiaries.

The United Nations Refugee Agency has consistently argued that biometric identification is essential to its international relief efforts for refugees, though recent initiatives in Syria and Egypt have utilized iris recognition instead of fingerprints. In the meantime, IB has released a new IB-PAD SDK that will improve the anti-spoofing capabilities of the company’s entire portfolio of fingerprint scanners.

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April 8, 2020 – by Eric Weiss