The OpenID Foundation was proud to join the recent ID4Africa 2026 Annual General Meeting in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire.
ID4Africa is the only pan-African movement dedicated to helping African nations build robust and responsible identity ecosystems, bringing together 48 member governments, international development agencies, and the private sector.
This year's theme, Digital Identity: From DPI to Digital Public Ecosystems, reflected a maturing conversation. The conversation is about more than just infrastructure; it embraces governance, interoperability, and the full spectrum of human and institutional factors that make digital identity work in practice and across society.
The OpenID Foundation’s contributions were made within a track focused on building digital public infrastructure (DPI) for open finance. The OpenID Foundation contributors also focused on how technical trust can be established across borders and between actors with no prior relationship.
Executive Director Gail Hodges, was joined by Vice-Chair and Co-Chair of the FAPI Working Group and Ecosystem Support Community Group Dima Postnikov, as well as Strategy and Marketing Director Elizabeth Garber, and SIDI Hub co-organizer and Secure Identity Alliance Executive Director Stéphanie de Labriolle represented the Foundation across two sessions.
Gail and Dima delivered a keynote presentation titled Digital Identity as the Backbone of Modern Financial Systems: Navigating eKYC, Open Finance, and Global Standards. The presentation set out the Foundation's perspective on where digital identity standards are heading and the role it is playing in supporting markets in getting there.
They walked their audience through the growing global adoption of OpenID Foundation specifications, covering the FAPI Security Profile for open data and finance, as well as OpenID for Verifiable Credentials. They mapped the real-world footprint of the specifications across ecosystems and cross-border implementations.
Three trends shaped the keynote's core argument. The first was the value of proven best practices - formally profiled standards, reference architectures, conformance testing, and interoperability events. They argued that markets that adopted this approach benefited from lower costs, faster implementation, stronger security, and freedom from vendor lock-in. Reference architectures were highlighted as particularly important for verifiable credential ecosystems, with AI threat mitigation and post-quantum cryptography readiness framed as additional reasons to invest in standards-based foundations now.
The second trend was an ecosystem approach - a shift from siloed implementations toward whole-of-economy thinking that spans identity, data, and payments across government, banking, health, and education. This means considering all identities (human, organisational, and system), establishing common trust frameworks, and evolving technology and policy together.
The third trend addressed the federated versus decentralised debate. This led to a pragmatic conclusion that many existing systems already work, and that privacy requirements differ by use case, so the right answer is often both. This theme was echoed in other presentations during ID4Africa, highlighting the « hybrid » model where foundational identity systems can blend verifiable credential solutions as well.
The session closed with a call to action for markets making these decisions to join the conversation and help shape the playbook, not just the procurement.
Gail also moderated a panel discussion titled "Technical Alignment in Support of Cross-Border Interoperability." It brought together Dima, Elizabeth, and Stéphanie to unpack several of these themes.
The session was designed to be concrete and practical, drawing on direct experience across Australia, Europe, Latin America, and beyond to focus on what has worked, what hasn't, and what to avoid.
Topics included:
Beyond the formal sessions, conversations throughout the event signaled growing momentum across the continent. A number of African jurisdictions are actively exploring verifiable credentials, examining relevant use cases and implementation approaches, and there is emerging interest in how cross-border use cases might be advanced through their adoption. The OpenID Foundation welcomes this momentum and looks forward to supporting the community as these conversations develop.
The OpenID Foundation (OIDF) is a global open standards body committed to helping people assert their identity wherever they choose. Founded in 2007, we are a community of technical experts leading the creation of open identity standards that are secure, interoperable, and privacy-preserving. The Foundation’s OpenID Connect standard is now used by billions of people across millions of applications. In the last five years, OAuth2 - the FAPI standard for interoperable, high security - has become the standard of choice for Open Banking and Open Data implementations, allowing people to access and share data across entities. Today, the OpenID Foundation’s standards are the connective tissue that enable people to assert their identity and access their data at scale, the scale of the internet, enabling “networks of networks” to interoperate globally. Individuals, companies, governments and non-profits are encouraged to join or participate. Find out more at openid.net.
To learn more about conformance testing and self-certification, please visit the OpenID Foundation’s FAQ section.
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