The Biometrics Revolution -- Alan Gelb and Julia Clark
Imagine that a government employee holding an unfamiliar device and a laptop offers to scan your iris and create for you a unique identification record. Would you agree? For hundreds of millions of people in the developing world, the answer is unequivocally “yes!”
My guests on this Wonkcast are among the world’s leading experts on the burgeoning field of biometric identification and its role in development. Senior fellow Alan Gelb and policy analyst Julia Clark are the authors of a new CGD working paper, Identification for Development: The Biometrics Revolution, the first global survey of the development applications of a potentially transformative new technology. They tell me that biometric identification systems could be the next big thing in development, similar to microcredit and mobile phones in the far-reaching ability to transform poor people’s lives.