Supporting 16th September as International Identity Day

International Identity Day takes place annually on 16^th September. This day of awareness is an initiative from ID4 Africa, and Ubisecure is very happy to support the campaign for its recognition by the UN.

The choice of date reflects the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16.9: “By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration”.

Why do we need International Identity Day?

It’s telling that the UN SDG 16.9 comes under the umbrella of goal 16: “Promote just, peaceful and inclusive societies“. Identity is key to this goal – the inclusion aspect in particular.

Identity is a key enabler to accessing all kinds of essential services – from banking, to travel, to receiving government aid. In all of these scenarios, individuals are first required to prove their identity. Yet, there are more than 1 billion people worldwide without a way to prove their identity. On an individual level this is extremely restrictive, leaving (often vulnerable) people excluded from services that could have a huge benefit in their day-to-day lives – not to mention the wider economic impact.

International Identity Day aims to raise awareness of this widespread issue and generate momentum towards finding solutions.

How does Ubisecure support the aims of International ID Day?

With identity solutions also comes responsibility – in particular, responsibility for ensuring security and privacy-by-design use of identity data. Throughout our near-two decades in the identity space, Ubisecure has been involved in creating the standards that inform solutions for public and private sector service users. We’re strong believers in the importance of collaboration across the identity sector to share expertise, ensuring responsible identity solutions that work for all kinds of services and all kinds of users.

At Ubisecure we also advocate for the value of organisation digital identity as a way of empowering individuals. For example, when an organisation is accurately and efficiently identified, and an individual can be accurately and efficiently identified as having the right to represent that organisation. This opens up significant opportunities compared to manual, less trustworthy attestations. A key technology for organisation identity going forward, and one that Ubisecure is at the forefront of, is the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), which provides highly assured, globally standardised legal entity reference data.

Find out more about International Identity Day at www.id-day.org.