Public key infrastructure will push intra-Africa trade
SUNDAY NATION By Mbugua Njihia
Sunday December 1,2013
Kenyans are a scared lot when it comes to government projects that point to personal tracking and infringement of user privacy. This has been especially fuelled by the very public citizen lash back in the US and Europe following allegations of government snooping.
I have on a number of occasions opined that the issue of privacy is overrated and many times taken out of context. At a recent workshop organised by the ICT Authority to update on the progress of the public key infrastructure project, consumer concerns on privacy came to the fore at the mention of the push toward one digital and unique identifier.
Public key infrastructure (PKI) as simplified by Wikipedia is “a system for the creation, storage and distribution of digital certificates that are used to verify that a particular public key belongs to a certain entity. The PKI creates digital certificates which map public keys to entities, securely stores these certificates in a central repository and revokes them if needed.”
With the process requiring an initial physical verification before issuance of a certificate and the validity being one year unless revoked by an issuing authority, PKI will make digital-only government operations a reality.
Banks and other financial institutions who haemorrhage capital in the billons every year, mostly from internal fraud, stand to benefit from the differentiated identification methods within PKI.
As we move onto digital platforms both online and mobile, the need to uniquely identify entities becomes paramount.
Trade makes the world go round and is driven by trust. Online marketplaces currently have in place measures to secure the transaction between buyers and sellers via Secure Socket Layers that encrypt, to varying degrees, communication between transacting parties.
The greatest beneficiary to a speedy and well thought out deployment by African countries of PKI is intra-Africa trade, which currently accounts for only 11 per cent in merchandise exports.
As governments grapple with geopolitics on matters of regional integration, but move forward on infrastructure projects that form another part of the trade fulfilment cycle, PKI will go a long way in seeding the trust that is needed in market ecosystems.
This is because it goes beyond securing the transaction channels to verifying the identity of the transacting parties, providing full confidence to either party. Players in the ICT space should apply themselves toward actively integrating PKI into their platforms.