ID 2020 Alliances & Funding
In 1999, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded $750 million to set up Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance.
In 2010, Bill and Melinda Gates announced a $10 billion pledge to usher in a decade of vaccines.
In 2019, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded the GSMA Inclusive Tech Lab, with the aim of which is to promote access to digital and biometric identity services and financial systems.
And finally ID2020 was launched in 2019, designed to leverage vaccination as an opportunity to establish digital identity. This digital identity system is said to carry “far-reaching implications for individuals’ access to services and livelihoods,”. ID2020 brings Gavi and Gates’ old company Microsoft and other corporate partners, including the Government of Bangladesh together to create a Global Digital ID system.
Gavi has been planning for many years to tie Vaccine recipients with Governmental Digital Health Records and, ultimately, with biometric ID databases. Meanwhile, Gates himself has been a vocal advocate of India’s Aadhaar system, the ambitious project to enroll a billion Indian citizens in the largest biometric database ever constructed.