Ideas to Action:

Independent research for global prosperity

Global Development: Views from the Center

Global Development: Views from the Center features posts from Nancy Birdsall and her colleagues at the Center for Global Development about innovative, practical policy responses to poverty and inequality in an ever-more globalized world.

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Global Development: Views from the Center

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The Eyes Have It! Development and the Biometrics Revolution

1/28/13
Alan Gelb

The “identity gap” is large, but it’s closing. Over the past 10 years, developing countries from Afghanistan to Zambia—and the donors that support them—have begun to focus on identity systems. Some have sought to create or extend national identification to cover large populations that previously could not exercise basic rights or access services due to a lack of official documentation. Others have reformed government and NGO programs by creating robust identification to improve quality, increase accessibility and eliminate fraud.

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Pakistan’s “Pocket of Productivity”: Empowerment through Identification

11/13/12
Alan Gelb

This is a joint post with Julia Clark.

Pakistan’s ahead of the pack.

Why? It’s National Database and Registration Authority—NADRA, the agency in charge of national identification—recently announced that it will begin issuing identity cards to orphans with unknown parentage; those without birth certificates or other documentation. This move effectively ensures citizenship rights for children who would otherwise have been excluded under regulations that require proof of nationality and parental lineage to obtain an ID card.

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Taxing Kenya’s M-Pesa Picks the Pockets of the Poor

10/15/12
Liliana Rojas-Suarez

Kenya has instituted a new tax that affects users of M-Pesa -- a widely popular phone-based money transfer service used by more than half of Kenya’s adult population. The new 10 percent excise duty on fees charged for money transfer services applies to mobile phone providers, banks, and other money transfer agencies. Operated by Safaricom, the largest mobile network operator in Kenya, M-Pesa accounts for the largest share of users of money transfer services. Users of M-Pesa products will therefore bear most of the impact of the tax.

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“No One Gets Past a Raptor” The 2012 Biometrics Consortium Conference: Tampa

10/15/12
Alan Gelb

Even with global sales around $5 billion, the biometrics industry is surprisingly clubby.  Most participants at the 2012 Biometrics Consortium Conference I attended recently seemed to know each other.  Most were from the US, but some  came from Europe, and from India and other developing countries.  Their backgrounds were diverse:  academics, entrepreneurs, engineers, lawyers, police, security and military personnel. And, of course, sales departments!

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Identification for Development, US Election Edition

10/12/12
Alan Gelb

This is a joint post with Julia Clark

On the surface, it’s hard to see how requiring a photo ID for elections could be problematic. What’s the big deal? Nearly everyone we know has at least one photo ID—a driver’s license, state ID, or passport. Plus, preventing double or illegitimate voting is a favorable goal in any democracy. Who could argue with a law that promises to protect electoral integrity?

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Technology in the Tropics: a Visit to Bangalore

10/11/12
Alan Gelb

Bangalore in September. Beautiful weather, luscious gardens, and the din of metro construction. But most importantly (for our purposes, at least), Bangalore is headquarters to the world’s largest biometric identification project. Every 24 hours, the Unique Identification Authority of India’s data center performs 100 trillion matches to ensure that each of the day’s 1 million new enrollees is distinct from the 200 million people already identified. This number crunching will only increase as the program scales to cover India’s 1.2 billion people.

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Clicks to Policy Bricks: Can Innovation Jumpstart Development Transformation?

8/6/12
Nancy Birdsall

I participated last week in a conversation about innovation and technology for development at the Brookings Blum Roundtable in Aspen. Amazing changes are happening out there that exploit new information technologies, improving the lives of the poor and vulnerable. But a big unanswered question for me is clicks to bricks (see #8 below: Are crowdsourcing and open access innovations being matched by innovations in making government accountable and delivering public services?) I am more convinced today that web-based innovations are helping poor people become their own change agents in making t

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