Hundreds of millions of people work, raise families and contribute to their communities, yet are turned away from healthcare, schooling, safety nets and banks because they cannot prove who they are. We build the trusted digital systems that help governments and institutions reach them, with dignity and without trading away their privacy.
Illustrative record showing how a decision is documented. Not a real person.
people worldwide have no official identification.
World Bank ID4D, 2025 editioncannot use a government-recognised digital ID online.
World Bank ID4D, 2025 editionpeople in low-income countries lack social protection.
World Bank, State of Social Protection 2025Global estimates from different measures; they overlap and are not added together. World Bank ID4D dataset
Two short films: the problem PeerPass exists to solve, and the song that carries its message.
How missing paperwork shuts people out of healthcare, schooling and support, and how community evidence reviewed by authorised officers can help them be recognised.
Because every life deserves recognition.
PeerPass is a humanitarian technology foundation. We design programmes with communities, build the software that runs them, and hand control to the governments and institutions responsible.
From safety nets and schools to clinics, farms and disaster recovery.
Explore programmes › SolutionsReady to configure for any public programme, offline-first.
See solutions › GovernmentsYour servers, your keys, your rules, with code you keep.
How we partner ›A trained officer registers the person on a tablet, online or offline. No smartphone needed.
Documents where they exist; where they don't, statements from authorised institutions or people in the community.
An authorised official reviews the case under the programme's own rules. Every decision can be appealed.
The government issues a limited credential, delivers the service and records a signed receipt.
Community knowledge can open a door, but it is never mistaken for legal identity. This is what makes PeerPass different.
Confirmed against the national ID authority or an official registry through an approved interface.
Attested by an authorised school, clinic, cooperative or local government office within its own mandate.
Independent statements from people who know the applicant, with conflict checks, human review and appeal. Used to include people, never to establish legal identity.
Written into every partnership agreement we sign.
Web platform and Android field app for assisted enrolment, community attestation, verifiable credentials and offline sync.
Discussions with public institutions on small, supervised pilots in social protection and agriculture.
Each pilot starts small, is evaluated independently against a baseline, and publishes its results.
No one should live without identity, and no one can ignore their existence.
Marc Berman interviews Dr. C. Sreeram on community-rooted recognition alongside formal identity systems, privacy and offline access.
Read the interview ›Bring us a programme that misses the people it was built for. We start with a workshop and a demonstration on test data.
Request a briefingHelp us run independently evaluated pilots with public institutions, and publish what works.
Support our workResearchers, security reviewers, translators and field practitioners make every programme stronger.
Offer your skillsPeerPass is a full software partner: products ready to configure, plus the integration, custom development, training and support a public programme needs.
Register people where they are, including those without complete documents.
Apply the programme's own rules consistently and explain every decision.
Let people prove one fact, such as enrolment or a qualification, without exposing the rest.
Show that benefits, inputs and services reached the right person, and find where they did not.
Each sector runs as its own governed service. Records are never pooled into one cross-ministry profile.
| Sector | Typical partner | Two common uses |
|---|---|---|
| Social protection | Social welfare ministries, cash-transfer agencies | Household verification for safety-net programmes; beneficiary check at payment points |
| Health insurance | Health ministries, insurance funds | Enrolling households missing documents; coverage check at facilities |
| Agriculture and livestock | Agriculture ministries, cooperatives | Including unregistered farmers in national farmer systems; input voucher redemption |
| Education and skills | Education ministries, training authorities | Tamper-proof certificates; recognition of prior learning |
| Civil registration support | Registration and ID authorities | Field capture of births for registration; referral of unregistered adults |
| Humanitarian response | Disaster agencies, humanitarian partners | Registering people who lost documents; assistance delivery records |
| Local government | District and municipal councils | Residence attestation for local services; service request tracking |
Connection to national ID, payment gateways and government data-exchange platforms through approved channels.
New modules built to the government's standards, with source code delivered to the government.
Training for government ICT staff, field officers and service points, in local languages.
Service-level agreements, security updates and incident response, delivered by local staff.
National identity, eligibility and legal decisions stay with the competent authorities. PeerPass supplies the technology that helps those decisions reach more people, faster and with a better record.
Deployed in government-approved data centres. Signing keys, access policy and backups under government control. No data leaves the country without lawful authorisation.
The government receives a licence to use and modify its configuration, documentation and training, with a clear exit plan from day one.
Built to national data protection law, e-government standards and the national ID authority's approved integration process.
We listen to the programme team: where people fall out, what systems exist, what the rules are.
A working demo in local language, using test data only, configured to what we heard.
A small pilot under a memorandum of understanding, in districts you choose, independently evaluated.
You decide: stop, adjust, take it in-house, or scale through your own procurement process.
Before the first person is enrolled, the ministry and PeerPass agree in writing what will be measured, against what starting point, and who checks the results. The government, not PeerPass, decides whether the pilot worked.
Who counts as eligible, what “reached”, “verified” and “served” mean, and what counts as an error are fixed in an evaluation plan signed by the ministry. Definitions do not change once the pilot starts.
We record the starting point from the ministry’s own records and a short survey in pilot and comparison areas: how many eligible people are reached today, how long it takes, what it costs and how complaints are handled.
Pilot areas are compared with similar areas that start later, in a phased rollout. That way a change can be credited to the pilot rather than to the season, a new budget or an awareness campaign.
| Indicator | Measured as | Baseline from |
|---|---|---|
| Coverage | Share of the eligible population reached | Programme records, census or survey estimate |
| Exclusion error | Share of sampled eligible people wrongly refused | Field spot checks and appeals |
| Inclusion error | Share of approvals that fail officer audit | Random audit, sample size agreed in advance |
| Speed | Median days to service | Current processing records |
| Cost | All-in cost per person served | Ministry budget lines and pilot accounts |
| Fairness | Every result split by sex, age, disability and location | The same data, disaggregated |
| Grievances | Share of complaints resolved within target | Existing complaints log |
| Data protection | Incidents, access-log anomalies, deletion requests met | Security log, reviewed monthly |
Agreed targets are met with no serious safeguarding or data-protection incident. The government chooses whether to extend, hand over or procure.
Changes are agreed in writing and the same indicators are measured again over a fixed period before any expansion.
The pilot closes. Records are returned to the government or deleted as the agreement sets out, and the findings are still reported.
Targets, sample sizes and the evaluator are agreed with the ministry before launch. The evaluation can be led by the ministry’s statistics unit, a university or an independent firm: PeerPass does not mark its own work. Only aggregate, anonymised results are published, and only with the government’s consent.
Where possible, PeerPass and its funders cover the cost of the demonstration and the first pilot, so a ministry can test the approach before committing a budget. Any later contract follows the government's own procurement rules.
We will send a short concept note and arrange a demonstration. Please do not send personal records with a first enquiry.
The architecture keeps personal data inside the government boundary and shares only what a decision needs.
Android tablet with encrypted queue, device authentication and inactivity lock.
Enrolment, case review and audit, hosted on government infrastructure.
National ID, registries and payments through the government's data-exchange platform.
Government signs limited credentials; service points check only what they need.
Steps 2 to 4 run inside the government security boundary. PeerPass holds no copy of the register.
| Area | Approach |
|---|---|
| Credentials | W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model 2.0; issuance and presentation following OpenID4VCI and OpenID4VP |
| Identifiers | Decentralised identifiers optional; no blockchain required |
| Keys | Government-held, hardware-backed key management, dual control and rotation |
| Access | Role-based access, multi-factor authentication for staff, separation of duties |
| Offline | Encrypted local queue, conflict-safe sync, bounded offline allowances to prevent double use |
| Audit | Tamper-evident logs, exportable for oversight bodies |
| Assurance | Threat modelling, independent penetration testing and acceptance testing before any live data |
| Languages | Interfaces localised for each country; assisted and paper routes for low literacy |
Every programme starts from a measured problem: children without birth records, families missing from social registries, farmers left off subsidy lists, people who lost their papers in a flood. All twelve use the same core, connect to systems the government already runs, and can be piloted in 90 days with existing staff.
Find the families the registry missed, and keep them paid.
Social protectionLead programme · Ready for pilot nowSocial registries leave out the households they were built for, and strict authentication can cut off people who are already enrolled.
No child turned away from school for lack of a certificate.
EducationReady to configure · Pilot on requestSchools often ask for a birth certificate before enrolling a child, and records rarely follow children who move, migrate or flee.
Every birth a health worker sees becomes a registered birth.
HealthLead programme · Ready for pilot nowHealth workers see newborns that the civil registry never hears about, and the children missed by vaccination are the same children missing from records.
Assistance that does not demand what was lost.
HumanitarianLead programme · Ready for pilot nowPeople who flee lose their papers first, and each agency then registers them again, slowly and with gaps.
Proof of what hands and minds can do.
EmploymentReady to configure · Pilot on requestMost workers in developing economies learned their trade informally, so they have skills but no certificate employers or training bodies will accept.
An account without a paper trail you never had.
Financial inclusionReady to configure · Pilot on requestBanks and mobile-money providers must follow identity rules, so people without documents are turned away even where regulators allow simpler checks for small accounts.
Smallholders recognised for what they grow.
AgricultureLead programme · Ready for pilot nowSubsidies, extension and insurance depend on farmer registries that leave out tenant farmers, women and anyone without land papers.
Proof that help reached the people it was meant for.
AccountabilityPartner-led · With a sector partnerMinistries and donors report money spent, but rarely know whether each household actually received what was promised.
A public service that asks once, and asks less.
Public servicesReady to configure · Pilot on requestCitizens carry the same documents from office to office, because ministries cannot trust each other's records.
Records that outlast the flood.
Disaster recoveryReady to configure · Pilot on requestFloods, cyclones and fires destroy the papers people need to claim relief, exactly when they need them most.
Keep smallholders in the export markets that now demand proof.
Export and traceabilityPartner-led · With a sector partnerNew buyer rules require proof of where coffee, cocoa, rubber, palm oil, soy, cattle and timber were grown. Smallholders without records risk being dropped by exporters.
Climate money that reaches the community.
Climate financePartner-led · With a sector partnerClimate funds increasingly reach countries, but communities rarely see how much arrives or who was paid for restoration work.
A ministry that adopts one programme already has most of the next one. The parts below are the same in every configuration; only the forms, rules and reports change.
Existing staff use an ordinary Android phone or tablet, with or without a connection. People without phones receive a paper QR credential that works the same way.
Why: 41% of adults without an ID cannot even buy a SIM card. ID4D 2025
Two independent people who know the person attest to specific facts. An accountable officer reviews every case under the programme's own rules.
Why: in a 640-village trial in Indonesia, community ranking was nearly as accurate as formula targeting (33% vs 30% error), with clearly higher satisfaction and no elite capture found. J-PAL
Records are issued as signed credentials that can be checked offline and reveal only the facts needed. No personal data is placed on a public blockchain.
Why: the W3C Verifiable Credentials 2.0 standard became a Recommendation in May 2025, so credentials work across vendors and borders. W3C VC 2.0
Runs on government servers or a cloud the government chooses, and is designed to connect with digital public goods such as MOSIP, OpenCRVS, OpenSPP, OpenG2P and DHIS2.
Why: MOSIP-based ID systems alone run in 26 countries with more than 130 million IDs; PeerPass extends them rather than competing. MOSIP
Each programme is designed so a ministry can try it inside one budget cycle, with its own staff, and decide on evidence.
A workshop with the ministry picks one programme, one district and the baseline figures. A data-protection impact assessment is completed before any enrolment.
Installed on the government's server. Forms and rules are set to the programme's existing policy. Staff complete a two-day training on test data.
200 to 1,000 people enrolled under supervision, with weekly review of errors, complaints and turnaround times.
An independent reviewer compares results with the baseline. The ministry chooses to scale, adjust or stop, and keeps all data either way.
Tell us the problem you are trying to solve. We will suggest the programme, or combination, that fits, and show it working on test data.
One evening our founder, Dr. C. Sreeram, spoke with people experiencing homelessness. They had no identity card, no address and no proof that they existed, and that kept them from healthcare, housing and welfare.
They worked, they lived, they dreamed, and they remained unseen. PeerPass Foundation was created to change that, by giving the institutions that serve people a trustworthy, respectful way to recognise them.
Every life has worth. Systems must protect that, not make people earn it.
Collect less, keep it shorter, share only what is needed.
Digital routes are never the only route.
A signature proves who said something, not that it is true.
Governments decide identity and eligibility. We build the tools.
Public specifications, so no one is locked in, including to us.
PeerPass Foundation Inc. is a nonprofit organisation incorporated in California, United States.
How peer-pass.com handles the information you send us. It is short because we collect very little.
PeerPass Foundation Inc., 1401 21st St #13526, Sacramento, CA 95811, USA. Questions about this notice: contact@peerpass.org.
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This website sets no cookies and uses no analytics, advertising trackers or social-media pixels. Fonts and videos are served from our own server, so visiting the site does not pass your details to Google or any other third party.
To reply to your enquiry and, if you wish, to discuss working together. We rely on your consent, given when you tick the box on the form, and on our legitimate interest in answering messages sent to us.
The form is delivered by our own web server to the PeerPass team mailbox. It is never sold, never used for marketing and never shared, except with the companies that host our website and email on our behalf, or where the law requires it. Messages marked as a safeguarding concern go only to the safeguarding lead.
Enquiries are kept for up to 24 months after our last exchange and then deleted, unless they become part of a formal partnership record.
You can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, or withdraw your consent at any time by writing to contact@peerpass.org. We reply within 30 days. You may also complain to the data protection authority where you live.
This website never collects data about people enrolled in PeerPass programmes. In a deployment, that data stays on government-approved servers under the government’s control and is governed by that programme’s own privacy notice.
This website is not directed at children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their details through it.
Last updated 17 October 2026.
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