Stronger political will is needed to fully realise the potential of the authentication service and truly bring government services, and Digital Identity, into the digital now.
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There are over 40 web portals, and a few more in the process of development, for the delivery of public services to citizens. From the Business Portal managed by the Ministry of Economic Development to Imuga Portal managed by Maldives Immigration, users are required to use some form of authentication to access and use these web portals.
Even though these portals are being used by the same people, each of them requires users to register using either a mobile number or an email address to use the portal, and most of them require additional information such as an Identity Card (ID) number, permanent address, or more. In other words, this is the same as being asked to bring a physical copy of your ID card every time you visit a government office.
There is a solution for this problem and it is the Single Sign-On authentication.
Single Sign-On (SSO) is an authentication method that allows users to log in to multiple related services from one single login or account. The National Centre for Information Technology (NCIT) launched an SSO in 2012 called e-Faas.
eFaas was created as an authentication method to be used for web portals providing e-government services, thus avoiding the need to create an account every time you want to use an e-government service. Eight years later, the amount of digital portals providing e-government services has increased significantly, but very few of them provide e-Faas as an authentication method, thus requiring citizens to create and maintain a separate account for each portal. According to the eFaas website, you can use eFaas on nine websites, including widely used portals such as the Ministry of Economic Development's Business Portal, the SME Development Finance Corporation's Customer Portal, the Civil Service's Viuga, and a few more.
According to an early team member of the eFaas project, eFaas was based on SingPass, the national digital identity project of Singapore. Unlike eFaas, SingPass has seen continuous developments and improvements, thus providing additional services. SingPass now comes with a mobile application, that provides additional features such as two-factor authentication (2FA), face verification and the ability to sign documents electronically.
The benefits of eFaas are not limited to the citizens who use it for authentication. eFaas provides a set of verification levels that can be used to provide service digitally. There are four levels of verification that service providers can use to decide whether a service can be provided to the user, or the service provider can opt to use a hybrid model, using some data from eFaas and collecting additional data from the user.
The biggest challenge to the mass adoption of eFaas is the limited service providers using eFaas as an authentication method. In February 2021, the Ministry of Environment, Climate Change and Technology (former Ministry of Communications, Science and Technology) released a circular mandating all government agencies use eFaas as the authentication method instead of building one of their own. Four months later, no noticeable increase in adoption has been seen.
To cultivate an e-government service, strong political will, strategy and collaboration is required.
According to the government’s Strategic Action Plan (SAP), by 2021, the government’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is required to develop the legal framework required to facilitate digital identity, thus highlighting the government’s focus on digitalising identity management.
The initial roadmap of the eFaas project included additional features such as 2FA, mobile app, and other services. After the Yameen administration took office in 2013, the government took a completely different approach to digital identity and launched a passport card that failed to reach a critical mass.
Many features offered by SingPass are excellent ideas to be integrated into eFaas, such as creating a mobile application to centralise e-Faas related notifications, 2FA, integration with the Department of National Registration to provide additional mediums of verification such as with biometrics.
In future, government to citizen (G2C) services will be heavily driven by modern technologies. As such, it is essential to have the building blocks in place for the G2C digital transformation. Digital Identity and SSO will play an important role in this transformation and plays extremely well with the Solih Administration's more decentralised Jazeera Rajje philosophy.
There is every hope that the newly minted Technology Minister, with a higher cache of political clout within the administration than her predecessor, will prioritise digitalisation efforts and use her political capital where it is needed — to put the full authority of her office behind G2C services and create a more enabling and forward-moving environment for the administration's CTO, NCIT and other government agencies.
