Life Certificate Initiative

Location: Philippines

In the Philippines, a month of economic stoppage has placed many impoverished families in deep perils, and assistance is slow to come as the government is scrambling to resolve both the health crisis and the financial devastation brought forth by the community quarantine.

The President was recently granted emergency powers, and about Php 200BN to disburse to families as a form of financial aid. Our social welfare department issued "Social Amelioration Cards" for them to claim such aid, but there are issues such as corruption and faked/replicated cards which makes the task all the more difficult for our government.

The Digital Life Certificate initiative is LAB.PH's contribution to the fight against the global pandemic. Today we see many visualization dashboards, digital solutions and contact tracing apps, but many of them are missing one key component to make them work on a larger scale -- a centralized, verifiable database.

Most applications are banking on the aspect of humanity to provide key information such as revealing their financial stature, their medical and travel histories, and their household activity, but this isn't something everyone would be comfortable with. Thus, we are creating an alternative form of identity using a product we call the 'Life Certificate' (LC). This platform is a revolutionary form of middleware that serves as a self-sovereign identity for citizens. It allows them to input personal and sensitive information into these certificates while ensuring that the data is accessible exclusively to them using their biometric data, stored and encrypted locally on mobile phones.

The LC's are essentially used as an onboarding mechanism for data capturing platforms to ensure that citizens are incentivized to provide real information tied to their identity as a digital fingerprint which then allows government units to accelerate the process of handing out aid. Similar to how Facebook allows you to use your account to sign up to websites/platforms that allow it to, we serve the same purpose, except you have full domain over your data. You may choose what to share, and only you may access the full gamut at any given time.

Examples of which include using your LC to sign up for platforms that conduct health/wellness checks, and more specifically we have a digital quarantine pass available in the Philippines with many crying foul over their data privacy issues, blatantly stating that our personal info may be shared to insurers, gov't authorities, private entities and so on.

The LC's are the definitive solution that ties data management applications together by securing your information and granting you full domain over what you want to share. Now, we're enabling a more GRANULAR overview of the Covid-19 situation and beyond.

This is a solution that we intend to scale across the world.

Support

We currently have a development team working on this, but our runway is quite short and we might not be able to come up with a polished product before it runs out. We would need to tap impact investment funds willing to dish out seed money or apply for grants to extend our development efforts.

Other needs: Volunteers, Access to information, Space for online convenings, Volunteer developers would be a huge help.

See more: https://lab.ph

For more information contact covid19@unmgcy.org