Muhammad Noor has for years busied himself creating new initiatives to support displaced Rohingya. Those efforts have included Rohingya Vision TV, a multilingual broadcasting channel to educate and empower the population worldwide, as well as an organized Rohingya Football Club that seeks to compete in the ConIFA World Minorities Cup.

However, his latest project utilizes his background as a software engineer and expertise in cryptography: A blockchain-based digital identification system exclusively for the Rohingya. The project will utilize a multilayered verification methodology to confirm Rohingya ancestry through a series of interviews and assessments that test on five areas: Geographical, social, language, culture, and occupational.  The resulting digital identity will cryptographically prove Rohingya existence and family relations, and record them on a blockchain distributed public ledger.  For Noor, blockchain is a logical step to answering the problems that come with being a stateless community, when a lack of identity results in financial exclusion and difficulty accessing health care, for example.

But others are far from convinced. For many members of the ICT4D community, the project represents experimentation on a vulnerable population — and the peak of blockchain hype and its inflated expectations. Wayan Vota, co-founder of ICTworks, blogged about the Rohingya Project in a post entitled “A really bad blockchain idea: Digital identity cards for Rohingya refugees,” where he pointed out four fundamental issues with the project, including asking Rohingya refugees, who already suffer from massive power imbalances, to surrender their digital privacy and become part of an experiment in order to receive services.

For better or worse, Noor is set on creating an identity for the Rohingya people in a cryptographic world. The development community, in the meantime, warns of the dangers of a technoutopia.

Read the full article about utilizing blockchain for global development by Kelli Rogers at Devex.