Many refugees and migrants cross borders without proper documentation or their passports are lost or stolen along the way. German police said recently that 80 percent of Syrian refugees in that country didn’t have the right paperwork. Without official identification refugees don’t have access to education, social services or to financial funds sitting in their home nations. Issuing new documents is expensive, takes time, and is open to fraud. This isn’t only a refugee problem. An estimated 1.5 billion people worldwide lack a legal identity. The United Nations wants to provide a legal identity for all citizens of planet earth by 2030. And one radical idea is a new kind of identity system based on blockchain technology.
This article was originally published on September 15, 2016
