Digital Identity for Refugees: A Spotlight Interview with Tykn
Over the last year, we have used our blog series to shine a spotlight on topics related to sanitation that can go underreported. We want to use the next few posts to highlight ways that data is being used to overcome major development challenges and improve the lives of vulnerable people around the world.
When you ask people about identity, it often starts a complex discussion about who they are. When asked to prove who we are, many of us can rely on our passports, birth certificates or academic certificates.
But what does it mean when you are left without proof of who you are? There are around 1 billion people globally who are without proof of identity. This is the reality for many refugees and asylum-seekers. When your country is suddenly thrown into civil war or a natural disaster occurs and you have to flee, those documents become your lifeline towards safety. Lack of proof of identity has a ripple effect. Without a proven identity, people cannot access healthcare, education, housing or employment. This is detrimental for refugees who are rebuilding their lives.
Tykn is a technological social enterprise that is championing digital identity to empower refugees in accessing opportunities. I spoke with one of Tykn’s co-founder’s Khalid Maliki to understand the identity crisis and Tykn’s Digital Identity Platform project.
RA: On your website, you tell the story of how Tykn was founded, could you elaborate on what motivated you and your co-founder to start Tkyn?
KM: Tykn started as an idea in 2016. I met my co-founder at a hackathon, and we were blown away by the fact there were refugees in the world without any sort of identity to prove who they are and who they were. We first started ideating about putting academic certificates on this new technology, Blockchain. Of course — a lot of those assumptions were thrown out the window after because once you validate the ID, you struggle with a lot of new concepts such as privacy.
It started as an idea to help people, in general. Identity is broken on the internet. When the internet was invented, it scaled rapidly but without an identity layer. For communication, it is really great. But no-one stopped and said let’s stop evolving and fix this problem first and then we can move on. We have an analogy we use here, the New Yorker’s most popular illustration, ‘On the internet no-one knows you’re a dog’. Now we have this cumbersome process, where we have to take a picture of ourselves or scan our passports and send it somewhere where we don’t actually know what they are going to do with your information.
Tykn was registered as a company in Amsterdam in 2017 and we later got in touch with international NGOs. By the end of 2017, we partnered up with the Netherlands Red Cross. It was a partnership and client relationship where we explored the use of identity and Blockchain for their projects. The rest is history –we got a lot of traction on our projects.
RA: Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs & United Nations Development Programme had initiated the Digital Identity Platform project. What is their overall aim through their collaboration with Tykn?
KM: We were invited in 2019 for a programme called SDG Impact Accelerator in Istanbul, Turkey. We were picked among many other companies to collaborate and be the cohort for this programme. We had participated in the livelihood, opportunities & digital identities track. It was one of the first accelerators that allowed us to go into the field.
We went into interviews with stakeholders and also with refugees themselves to talk about their needs and issues. They get a temporary protection card from the Turkish government, which is how they identify themselves. If they need to move from town-to-town, they would need permission. It was a cumbersome paper-based process. Our assumption was first, let’s digitise this process and we solve the problem. But when we talked with the refugees and they say they don’t have any problems with having the card in their pockets. The problem really lies elsewhere. The fact that for employability, it’s very hard to prove who you are. For entrepreneurs and business owners in Turkey, if you want to hire people who are refugees or non-nationals, you need to have a work permit. That is still a very paper-based process. We started tackling that small problem through digitising that process. So, when you get through to our platform and have to prove certain criteria, for example, that you own a business and then you can have an accounting report done in two clicks. That gives them a lot of room — in terms of in time and effort. So that is what we piloted this summer in Turkey with the UNDP and the Turkish government. They provided us an environment where we could sit with Turkish entrepreneurs and business owners and they went through the process of applying for work permits through our platform. This process also gave us a lot of feedback and learnings.
RA: How involved are refugees & asylum seekers in the planning process of your projects?
KM: For Turkey, if you take it as an example, we thought we would be dealing directly with people who are refugees most of the time. But we saw the whole flow and we thought we could digitise this process at the end of the tunnel, but this wasn’t the case. We went directly to the business owners, who could hire refugees. The employability was a lengthy and costly process. So, for example, the business owners had to give the log-ins and passwords for the e-government platform to an accountant. This will do the application for them and that costs money for the entrepreneur. But what actually happens under the table was that these costs are forwarded to the refugees through cutting their salary. As we know that refugees don’t earn much already, and this is tough. So, a lot of entrepreneurs and business tended not to apply for work permits, which resulted in heavy fines, if caught. We thought to make the process easier for the business owners who want to hire refugees, by allowing them [business owners] to get proof in this case. For example, they would receive a set of credentials and had to just press approve in our app to confirm that they owned a business. Once this was verified, it will get forwarded to the Ministry of Labour. The magic of this happens in the background as it is cryptographically proven that you are dealing with the real information which has been given by you, as the identity owner. So, you have all the consent to receive the information. What we also make possible through this new kind of approach is data minimization. For example, when banks ask for our passports, they are basically just asking for your birth date or birthplace. But the problem is we send a full picture of our passports, which is too much information and there needs to be regulations or laws in place that protects these types of data sharing. What we provide in this platform is that it automatically picks only the relevant information that is needed. This is then forwarded to the verifier to verify this data and also confirms what they are doing with the data they may have already existing in their databases.
RA: I think that’s really important because for people who are refugees, the concept of privacy is always so hard to maintain, especially with data.
KM: We took this into consideration in our user experience and design. We really want to protect people’s data and preserve their privacy, in a way that they feel safe and is still easier to use. Since it is also new cutting-edge technology, it’s not widely used yet, so we’re trying to make it as user friendly as possible whilst also preserving the data. As you said, it is a general problem for everyone, but refugees are especially on the frontline. We have talked with refugees here that could do surgery blind-folded and have academic certificates and diplomas. But, now here in the Netherlands, they are working stocking shelves at the grocery store, because they can’t prove their diplomas. We have talked with Syrian refugees, who came to the Netherlands and they can’t prove their certificates or diplomas because their universities were destroyed. So, what we hope is with this kind of technology is that even if Tykn or an institution ceases to exist, we can still mathematically prove that this was issued to you at a certain time and it is valid.
RA: At Gather, we talk about how interconnected dignity and access to sanitation is. What values & ideas are central to Tykn’s work?
KM: For us, our main value is to create opportunity through digital identity. Digital identity is just a means to an end. It’s just the tool that you can use, however, it is not the purpose. But what we want to give to people are access to real opportunities and services they need in their lives. That’s why we started as an identity-focused company and shifted to the question: how can we make someone’s life easier through digital identity? If they want to open a bank account, how can we make that easier for a refugee? If you want to apply for a mortgage or a loan, how can we do that? We are not an NGO; we are a commercial business but with a social impact-focused enterprise that really want to make a difference in the world. So, we want to make access to those services available for a wide spectrum of refugees. There are more than 1.2 billion people unidentified in the world. These people don’t have access to basic human rights like education and healthcare. So how could we provide these? That’s what we try to do. We are not the only ones in this field. We want to co-create an eco-system that could be used by NGOs, local governance or commercial parties like banks and insurance companies.
RA: With discussions of social justice and technology, there are those that feel that those within technology have a role to play within social justice. Where do you feel Tykn fits within this?
KM: There are always responsibilities that we will, and every company must take, if it’s either in social justice or in other pillars. Tykn focuses on the specific SDG, 16.9, providing legal identity for all. This has a domino effect, because to ensure social justice and equal welfare, we need to start somewhere within the infrastructure. What we provide is the kind of technology that will make other things such as healthcare and education available for people. That’s why we are really focusing on that really specific niche and providing that through technology. In design, there is a concept we call ethical design, which we take into account so that we don’t discriminate in our designs. In the self-sovereign identity world, it’s mostly grey-haired men that spend all day talking about how to improve the world. There is a really great organisation called Women in Identity, who talk about the ways in which the way we design our products are strongly male-based. So, we try to be a step ahead and think about how much we can include as possible within our designs and our processes.
RA: What do you feel about Blockchain & how that’s transformed their ability to work with vulnerable groups?
KM: Blockchain is a small part of our technology, but it is a vital part. It will become really important when you have a wide buy-in from stakeholders, government and institutions who want to use a network. We never put actual data on Blockchain because that would also be against regulations such as GDPR. What we use Blockchain for is like what you see in the Yellow Books. If you want to know an address for a company and it is in there because it is registered. We know that we have an NGO, in this case, let’s say the Red Cross. We know that this is the real Red Cross that is issuing this information to their beneficiaries or people affected. What we have tried to do in our solutions is to ensure that the end-users do not have to use Blockchain at all. It’s like these days, we all use email, but no-one needs to actually know how email works to use it, it just works. That’s the magic. We know URLs and https, but no-one knows the real protocols behind it, it just works for us. That’s the way we can see Blockchain. When it evolves, it becomes like the plumbing. But what they need to understand is that they can feel safe knowing that their data is private and preserved. They only control the data and we are giving control back to the people. You have the full control to share data with who you want.
RA: What is your take on the benefits of anonymising data? Also, do you think there are risks of anonymising data?
KM: The benefit is that there is less hassle for the users and also for the companies who have to deal with data. The risks can be from if you want to learn from what you do. So, you would need analytics, if you want to measure the impact of what you have done as a company or NGO. The regulation also requires that you need to have another audibility in place, you need to audit all the data you might encounter. When you anonymise, it is very hard to do that. It is finding the right balance where you don’t give too much information away. But at same time, you have the control of what you have shared, and you could also revoke any access and rights that have to deal with your data, if you don’t want to deal with third parties anymore.
RA: There are important discussions on who we trust with the data of vulnerable people such as refugees –private companies have very little accountability and oversight so should we be placing our trust in them?
KM: I think we should always be careful and I’m saying this even being a private company, as Tykn is. You need a third party that is involved in auditing the data, which is what Tykn is doing in this case. Luckily, we are in an ecosystem that works with governments and NGOs and we are really on the front row of preserving that and helping to give human rights back to people. But even then, you need to be very careful. for every company that has a commercial interest, your intention could also always change. For example, we have seen companies that have started with an audacious good goal but maybe they got pressured by their shareholders or by the overall public opinion. Then they start deviating from their original objective that they have set to do. So that’s the reality.
RA: It is a difficult thing for vulnerable people to share their data, even with governments. Can we trust governments anymore with regards to private data, when they may target citizens or lose people’s data?
KM: As a company, what we want to avoid is working with regimes and governments that are also wanting to track people or certain ethnic groups. The thing is that you are providing the technology for a purpose and only for that purpose and you hope that you are only trying to work with the people that really have the best interests for vulnerable people. We also try not to deviate from our core beliefs and that is always having control over your own data. In the end, if you want to cut all the connections and the peer-to-peer connections with all the institutions and governments you have to deal with, you can do that.
RA: Any current book, podcast, tv, film recommendations?
KM: One of my favourite books is ‘The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business’ by Erin Meyer. Every employee we welcome at Tykn, we give them The Culture Map to read. The thing is that when you work in a company like ours, you kind of want to be a mirror to the target audience that you are serving. We have different backgrounds and ethnic backgrounds on our team and when you have an international team, it’s really good to have a way of communicating but also to know the differences. To know how we perceive information and how we can translate that. I am from a Moroccan background, but I am born and raised in the Netherlands. The Dutch tend to be very direct. When the ‘Culture Map’, when I read it the first time, it was actually recommended by one of our strategic advisors and it opened my eyes. It really gives you that kind of context and values of every culture and what are the things you need to think about before engaging in communication. It is something we all use to this day. In the book, it describes high context and low context cultures. The highest-context culture was the Japanese culture, because you really need to read between the lines, if I want to ask you something, I don’t say it, I just talk about a subject and you need to read between the lines and understand that. There’s some matrixes and illustrations that really puts the theories into practice as well.
Tykn are a company that explores how technology can play a fundamental part of vulnerable people’s lives. To read more about their projects, visit their website, Twitter and Linkedin. To hear more from Tykn, sign up to their newsletter, where you can find curated compilations of all things digital identity. You can also find their blog here, where you can read their beginner’s guide to self-sovereign identity.
Keep up with our Spotlight series right here and we hope to see you on our next post!
