Across the globe, millions of displaced people are rebuilding their lives in new countries and navigating a persistent obstacle: the documentation barrier. While they have spent years growing careers, establishing homes, and developing financial lives, when they cross a border, the records that verify that history rarely carry. Systems on the other side have no reliable way to recognize what someone has built somewhere else or to extend trust on that basis. As a result, skilled, economically active people are forced to start from zero, invisible to the institutions that determine who can open a bank account, rent a home, or find work that matches their abilities.
The technology to bring down the documentation barrier through digital credentialing exists, but no product has been built at the scale that the global displacement crisis demands. We partnered with Civitas ID, an open-source digital public infrastructure platform, to design a product that institutions would trust and displaced people would actually use, beginning with Colombia, a country that has welcomed nearly three million Venezuelan migrants over the past decade.
That work is now guiding Civitas ID as it develops its core product: a digital wallet and orchestration layer giving displaced people ownership of cryptographically signed, verifiable credentials that institutions can trust.
Systems Unadaptable to the Reality of Displacement
Through conversations with migrants and institutions in Colombia, we saw what happens when mass displacement moves faster than the systems meant to absorb it. Faced with an unprecedented wave of Venezuelan arrivals, Colombia built its response in real time, issuing a succession of temporary permits, each with a new ID number, as policy evolved. But each new permit created a new identity in the database, unconnected to those before it. One engineer we met in Bogotá appeared as four separate people in the national health database, his records disconnected across every permit he had ever held.
When official systems failed to recognize them, people improvised. We met a 60-year-old Venezuelan ice cream vendor running a profitable business who, without a valid Colombian bank account, had no way to accept digital payments in his own name. Because his daughter held Colombian citizenship through her mother, she became his workaround, accepting customer payments and passing the money back to him. Across our research, many displaced people had built similar arrangements, depending on relatives, friends, or willing acquaintances to receive payments, rent homes, and access digital services on their behalf.
Both the engineer and the vendor were actively building histories, but had no way to make them legible to the systems that mattered. One had years of medical visits; the other had a long-running, profitable business. Across the country, displaced people are generating real signals of credibility, using workarounds to pay rent, cover bills, and find steady work, but the system has no mechanism to translate those signals into something institutions rely on to extend services in return
A Roadmap for Recognition
These insights led us to identify three opportunity areas for the Civitas ID prototype: continuity, mobility, and visibility.
Continuity addressed the identity reset problem, linking evolving documents into one stable record that persisted across policy changes. Mobility tackled the opacity challenge, giving users clarity on what they needed to reach a specific goal and a path for getting there. Visibility focused on recognition, turning informal work, payments, and prior experience into credentials institutions could trust.
These opportunities were translated into two product pillars for Civitas ID’s MVP product in Colombia. The first, Goal Paths, served as the guidance layer, turning opaque institutional requirements into achievable roadmaps. The feature organized documents around a specific goal: accessing credit, finding employment, securing housing. At each step, users could see what credentials they already had, what was missing, and what action would move them forward.
The Verified Profile served as the trust layer, bringing fragmented identity and financial credentials into a portable, user-controlled profile with verification statuses institutions could understand. As users completed milestones along a Goal Path, their profiles became stronger and they became better positioned to access a service or opportunity. Together, the features allow users to compile evidence of readiness as they rebuild their lives.
Since completing the Colombia research, Civitas ID has moved into build. The minimum viable platform is complete, with a target to be in production by Fall 2026. As the product nears launch, Civitas ID is expanding into new markets, with discovery and design work underway in Kenya.
