Enhaced social protection through interoperability: ID systems standards released
Identification systems play a critical role in delivering effective, inclusive, and well-targeted social protection, as they allow the accurate identification of individuals, ensuring that benefits reach the right people while preventing duplication and fraud. However, the way these systems are designed and implemented differs significantly from one country to another.
To enable meaningful collaboration across these diverse contexts, the Digital Convergence Initiative (DCI) has released new interoperability standards focused on enabling secure and reliable interoperability between identification (ID) systems and social protection systems (SP-Systems).
Version 1.0.0 of the ID systems and SP-Systems Interoperability Standards is now available on Gitbook. The standards, endorsed by the USP2030 Partnership, adopt OpenID Connect (OpenID foundation) and Verifiable Credentials (W3C) as the technical foundation for interoperability. These open standards provide a secure and trusted framework that allows social protection systems to authenticate individuals and request reliable identity data—such as demographic attributes and authentication tokens—from ID systems in a privacy-preserving manner. This approach ensures that identity data can be exchanged safely while maintaining trust, security, and scalability.
These standards do not address how to build an identification system, nor how to integrate it with non-SP domains (such as health or education). Instead, they concentrate on what is needed for interoperability specifically between ID and SP systems—enabling social registries, integrated beneficiary registries, and other SP platforms to connect meaningfully and securely with ID systems.
This milestone reflects months of in-depth research, thorough review, and close collaboration by our standards committee, which brings together experts from 20 diverse organizations. Their collective expertise has shaped standards that are both robust and practical.