Small states should build identity networks, not vaults

For most of my years in government, the goal was one authoritative record: One place for every birth, marriage, divorce and death. One number to tie it all together.  

Development partners showed us the model, and many of us, myself included, worked inside it. 

That model made sense when it was designed. Verifying a person meant calling back to a central store.  

Connectivity was thin. Standards were immature. A single register was the practical answer. 

But it is not the answer today.  

Instead of a single institution or platform holding everyone’s records, I now argue that the state should remain responsible for legal identity and federated exchange routes can enable that. 

Integration is not consolidation 

Across small islands and developing states, governments are still offered the same package: a civil registration system, a national ID linked to it, and a population register that joins them.  

Tonga launched one in 2025. Samoa, Dominica and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines are preparing theirs. 

United Nations (UN)’s guidance supports integrated civil registration, vital statistics and identity management, but not one database.  

Its own legislative guidelines say these systems need not be electronically linked.  

Integration means records working together. Consolidation means putting them in one place.  

The second does not follow from the first. 

The Nordic registers are often held up as proof that consolidation works. They rest on six decades of institutional trust.  

The architecture travels easily, but the trust does not. 

What the record shows 

Population registers have leaked through the channels around them.  

In Argentina, images from the national register were extracted in 2021 through a ministry’s VPN account.  

In Bangladesh, a registration website exposed about 50 million national ID numbers in 2023.  

Concentrated government infrastructure has also failed whole countries: ransomware took down all of Vanuatu’s government systems in 2022, backups included. 

Courts have drawn lines too. Jamaica’s Supreme Court struck down its national identification law in 2019, warning that the cure must not be worse than the ailment. 

History adds a harder lesson, which is that a complete and accurate register serves whoever governs next. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) raises the stakes again.  

A study this year showed that an AI agent could re-identify people at scale for a few dollars each. A leaked population register would make that work far easier. 

In small states, insider misuse is the sharper risk. One record often identifies a neighbour. 

Keep the state responsible, not one institution 

The building blocks are no longer experimental. Estonia’s X-Road has run federated data exchange for two decades: data stays with each agency, and requests are routed, signed and logged.  

Verifiable credential standards were finalised in 2025, and every EU member state must offer a digital identity wallet by December 2026. 

Here’s what to do to make the shift from one agency or platform to a one state approach: 

Start with the person. The ID holder belongs at the centre, holding their own credentials, choosing what to share and seeing who has looked.  

That was the heart of Citizen-as-a-Platform, and it still is. 

Then separate the jobs the monolith fuses. The authority responsible for nationality should act as the registrar of nationality. It certifies that a person is a national, and the official name and number by which the state recognises them.  

The authority that issues work permits and resident visas does the same for residents. 

A national digital ID platform should be neither of these.  

It authenticates people, using those authorities as identity providers, and issues no identity of its own.  

A national and a work permit holder log in through the same platform, each vouched for by the authority responsible for their status.  

Change the platform, or its vendor, and nobody’s legal status moves with it. 

Births and deaths stay with the civil registrar, marriages with the court, addresses with the council. Each keeps its own record and signs its own attestation.  

A federated exchange routes requests between them, holds nothing itself and logs every request, so the holder can see who asked.  

A death still reaches the registrars, but as an event, not as a merged table. 

This goes further than my own work 

I should be clear about where I stood. Citizen-as-a-Platform kept government as the trusted foundation and built transparency and choice around it.  

My work on the Amplified Sovereignty Paradox also assumed a strong central core. 

I now think the core itself should be distributed, with the holder still at the centre.Built for what comes next 

AI agents will soon act for us: renewing a licence, applying for a benefit.  

Each task needs proof of one fact, not access to the whole person.  

A central register can answer yes or no, but only its access rules keep it to that.  

In a credential-based design, selective disclosure builds the minimal answer into the architecture.  

The ITU and the World Bank already describe an agent’s credential as identity together with authorisation: specific, time-bound and revocable. 

Not only a small-state problem 

Large states face the same questions. In 2024, a ransomware attack on Indonesia’s national data centre disrupted more than 200 agencies.  

Vietnam has run a national population database since 2021. But states that have already consolidated must retrofit.  

Most small states can still choose, and they feel the consequences first. 

The window is now 

In the Maldives, digital identity and digital transformation bills, with data protection and cyber security bills, went to committee in the People’s Majlis in mid-2026.  

Next door in Sri Lanka, UNDP opened bidding in late October to build the OneRegistry civil registration system, planned as the foundation for its new identity card and digital ID.  

Both countries register almost every birth, so coverage is not the problem. Governance is. 

A sovereign cloud or a new civil registry can host separate systems. What matters is whether records stay with separate authorities or merge into one database.  

A bill in committee and a tender still open are the moments to separate the platform from the authorities that certify nationality and residence.  

This is also the time to require an exchange that routes rather than stores, independent oversight of its operator, and a guaranteed non-digital route. 

Before building another population register, we should ask who should have the authority to join a person’s records, and under what conditions. 

We should build networks, not vaults. 

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Mohamed Shareef is a former Minister of State for Environment, Climate Change and Technology in the Maldives (2021-2023). He previously served as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Communications, Science and Technology (2019-2021) and as Chief Information Officer at the National Centre for Information Technology (2009-2014), where he led the development of the country's national digital public infrastructure. He has also worked in academia, including as a researcher at the United Nations University. He currently serves as Senior Advisor for Digital Transformation at Nexia Maldives. More of his work is at mshareef.mv.