India, Venezuela unveil AI pact; Ghana advances digital ID

India and Venezuela have signed a partnership agreement to jointly explore the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital public infrastructure in sectors such as health, payments, and education.

The partnership was finalized recently during Venezuelan Vice Minister for ICT Raul Hernandez’s visit to India. P Kumaran, the Secretary for the Ministry of External Affairs, signed the agreement on behalf of the Indian government.

The cooperation is wide-ranging, including setting up pilot projects in Venezuela to test some of India’s digital solutions like Aadhaar, the national digital identity program and the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) instant payments system. It will also include training Venezuelan nationals in India on digital advancements.

“Both sides agreed to carry out pilot projects in the priority areas of Venezuela. Training and capacity building in AI and related areas were also discussed, with Venezuela showing keenness to send its technical personnel for courses in India,” one official source told The Hindu.

India has emerged as one of the key players in the global AI sector in recent years. The South Asian country is now home to the second-largest ChatGPT and Claude AI userbase. According to a BCG study, 92% of India’s workforce regularly uses AI tools in their jobs, outpacing America’s 64%. A separate study found that India has the highest AI skills penetration in its workforce globally.

With a population of over 1.466 billion, India has also become the leading frontier for AI firms seeking user data to train their models, especially with China shut out to Western firms.

Beyond AI, the two will explore how India’s digital public infrastructure (DPI) could be integrated in the South American country to boost digital identity, public services, health, and payments.

This includes Aadhaar, India’s digital identity system, which boasts a 95% uptake in the populous nation. With a single universal digital identity, Indians have easier access to public and private services and government benefits such as welfare and pensions. Venezuela, on the other hand, is still lagging in digital identity; it has come closest with the Fatherland Card, introduced in 2016, but whose uptake has slowed in recent years.

Ghana taps US-based Trust Stamp for tokenized digital ID

Elsewhere, the Ghanaian government has partnered with American identity verification solutions provider Trust Stamp (NASDAQ: IDAI) on a tokenized digital ID project.

Trust Stamp signed a two-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the National Identity Agency (NIA) to provide identity tokenization to both public and private agencies. The two will form a joint working team to oversee the implementation of the MoU and establish a revenue-sharing agreement.

The NIA is Ghana’s identity services provider and the issuer of the national ID card, known as the Ghana Card. The chip-embedded card stores biometric data such as fingerprints and a facial image, making it the primary digital identity solution for Ghanaians. The government has pledged to widen its scope and make it a single source of identity, similar to India’s Aadhaar, and the new partnership is a significant stride toward this goal.

“NIA is the foundation of Ghana’s digital economy and governance infrastructure… the NIA team understands the importance of their work to every area of Ghana’s society, and they have developed a compelling vision based upon the adoption of privacy-protecting, tokenized digital identity, building upon the successful implementation of the Ghana Card,” commented Trust Stamp CEO Gareth Genner.

A tokenized digital ID infrastructure enables citizens to create and manage their digital identity in securely, allowing them to prove specific aspects of this identity, such as their age or citizenship status, without revealing the rest of the information.

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