Tens of thousands of Rohingya who have fled violence and persecution in Myanmar are taking refuge in Malaysia. However, they’re in a state of limbo – unable to work legally or send their kids to school. But one project aims to change that. It’s using blockchain — a secure database technology — to create digital identities for the refugees giving them access to services such as financing. Rian Maelzer met with the co-founder of the Rohingya Project in Kuala Lumpur. MUHAMMAD NOOR MANAGING DIRECTOR, THE ROHINGYA PROJECT “The Rohingya Project is actually laying down a foundation to an antidote of the statelessness issues. They need education, they need health care, they need all other facilities or services that any normal citizens do. But being stateless you do not get access to all these services. Simply, one of the major reasons is because you don’t have an identity, so what Rohingya Project is targeting is that to come up with a self-solvent digital identity using the cutting-edge technology which is the blockchain technology, and using this identity as an access key to the financial platform where people can do some sort of trading, some sort of transactions, rather now living in a dark economy coming into the mainstream economy where they will have a credit history and their can be some access to P2P kind of loans and access to micro-finance and so on.”
