Frequently asked questions
What is the objective of G2P connect?
- The objective of G2P Connect is to enable governments to meet any government-to-person payments need by leveraging existing G2P solution blueprint, open interoperable specifications and design templates. These digital assets enable countries and governments to reuse proven methods and continue to innovate to improve time to market and scale the offerings.
What is G2P Connect?
- G2P Connect is both a technological blueprint of open interoperable specifications, as well as an operational deployment kit, and a sandbox environment for governments to build, launch, improve, or scale G2P payment programs.
Why G2P Connect?
- G2P Connect is an effort to help governments successfully develop and operate G2P payments digitally. G2P Connect enables countries to create a shared infrastructure that different agencies can use to deliver any kind of payment digitally and efficiently, including:
- Identity of beneficiaries
- Eligibility
- Enrollment
- Mapping IDs to accounts
- Monitoring
- etc.,
Is G2P Connect a for-profit effort?
- G2P Connect is a not-for-profit endeavor made possible by various organizations coming together with a shared goal of helping governments with end-to-end G2P payments.
How does G2P Connect work with a country?
- Below is an overview of the stages of engagement between G2P Connect and an interested country
What are the specific problems G2P Connect can solve?
- When setting up G2P systems, countries often face bottlenecks and challenges. These include dependencies on many departments across the government that hinder the efficient and secure deployment of these payments, siloed solutions that are expensive to deploy and maintain, vendor lock-in issues resulting from a lack of comprehensive assessments and contractual safeguards, and risks to digital and data sovereignty when foundational systems are procured from foreign vendors.
- G2P Connect addresses each of these problems. By taking an open standards and “any use case” approach, it reduces siloing and redundancies, offers safe, reusable, customisable, and rapidly scalable digital infrastructure that can be leveraged by any department for any use case, eliminates risk of vendor lock in, and protects data sovereignty.
What are the specific inputs that G2P Connect will provide to countries?
- G2P Connect provides:
- A single point-of-contact for customizing a country’s G2P solution.
- Freely available set of specifications on Github with no partnership / signatory required .
- Technical design support during all phases of the program, starting from design to any post-deployment solution challenges.
My country already has an existing G2P solution, how can G2P Connect be helpful? Will I have to build a completely new solution again?
- Countries will not have to build completely new solutions. Countries can either conduct a gap analysis in their G2P solutions and use G2P Connect’s DPG modules to fill the gaps, or they can use the freely available specifications mentioned above to make their solution more interoperable and governance practices to strengthen the solution overall.
My country has the capacity to build a G2P solution and product. How can I leverage G2P Connect?
- Countries can use the freely available set of G2P Connect specifications on Github which requires no additional partnership / signatory. However, they are also welcome to reach out to G2P Connect with questions and requests for support with customization and deployment.
Who is responsible for the maintenance of country instances of G2P Connect?
- While G2P Connect will provide advisory support in addition to community driven support, the country’s technology team will own the maintenance of their own custom G2P systems.
Will I have to coordinate with individual DPGs for creating a solution and deploying G2P Connect?
- Countries will connect with a neutral, independent single point-of-contact. Depending on need, this contact will help them gather appropriate support to develop the G2P system desired, as well as other governance frameworks around it in close collaboration with the countries G2P Connect support is an extension to the country's core design team and to provide required assistance for successful roll out keeping the country's interest first.
What are the available options to adopt and deploy G2P Connect?
- Depending on the systems a country already has in place and their additional needs:
- Specifications only: Countries that have an existing, robust G2P solutions ecosystem, can adopt G2P Connect’s free open specifications to make their existing or procured solutions interoperable.
- Specifications and missing modules: Countries that have gaps in their G2P solutions ecosystem, can reference solution blueprint along with compliant DPGs, if they wish, to create an end to end infrastructure.
- Specifications and the full stack of modules: Countries that are building G2P ecosystems from scratch, can choose to use the end-to-end G2P Connect specifications, leverage the sandbox, and also select DPGs/products that are compliant to build their own G2P infrastructure.
What is the typical amount of time required to create a country-wide solution architecture?
- The time to deployment depends on the country's context and existing systems. G2P Connect was created to enable countries to rapidly design, procure, and deploy any G2P payment system for any use case. A single point-of-contact will also be available to help facilitate the custom solutioning required for each country’s needs.
Will G2P Connect provide funding to countries for deployment?
- G2P Connect is an open source effort to offer an integrated government-to-person payments solution blueprint and design templates with the aim of helping countries build well architected and interoperable G2P solutions. G2P Connect is not a funding entity but provides Pro Bono services by augmenting design resources to the country’s core design team.
How can G2P Connect sandbox help countries?
- The G2P Connect-hosted sandbox enables countries to experience a full-stack, end-to-end G2P payment solution composed of DPGs and proprietary products/solutions in G2P space that have adhered to G2P Connect’s open specifications.
What can I do with the G2P Connect blueprint?
- Countries can refer to G2P Connect solution blueprint to validate and re-image Country specific G2P platform architecture and design. The primary goal of G2P connect solution blueprint is to provide a robust proven modular platform that adheres to core design principles.
What are the different modules of G2P Connect?
G2P Connect covers the following modules:
- Scheme management
- Payment switch
- Bank/mobile wallet system
- Last mile cash in/cash out system
- Identity
- Functional registries
- Digital credentialing solutions
- ID to Account Mapper
- Unified Views for Policy Makers, Citizens and First mile delivery assisted operators
All the above modules are loosely coupled and the countries may evolve the G2P solution in a planned and incremental approach.
What are the possible use cases of G2P Connect?
- There can be multiple use cases for G2P Connect ranging from immediate cash transfers during a crisis, to periodic cash transfers for standard programs like maternity benefit schemes.
How can countries without ID or Civil registration systems use G2P connect?
- If a country doesn’t have a foundational biometric ID system and/or civil registration with less coverage then countries may leverage the demo deduplication module from the ID system to strengthen the beneficiary registry. Additionally, Beneficiary management systems can issue digital verifiable credentials to streamline service delivery using credentialing systems. These are a few examples and the G2P Connect technical team can help customize such a solution to meet country needs.
Can G2P Connect be scaled across countries in a short period of time?
- G2P Connect is designed for population scale and can be rapidly deployed at that level.
Can countries request product features be added to G2P Connect?
- Countries can send their product feature needs and rationale, after which the G2P Connect technical committee will review and reach out to the country accordingly.
Where can countries find current product/features roadmap?
- The current list of product categories are available in the solution architecture blueprint on the website. A comprehensive list of features will be available through assessment reports completed by DPGs and licensed product companies in collaboration with G2P Connect.
How are G2P Connect and Digital Convergence Initiative aligned?
- The DCI and G2P initiatives are both open source and a collective of organizations trying to solve problems in the social protection space. While DCI is an open, transparent and virtual community working for building consensus around open standards and guidelines for social protection, G2P Connect is an open source effort for building consensus around technical standards related to government-to-person payments digitally only.
- Intersections of DCI and G2PConnect within the social protection sector is provided in the figure above. The social protection sector could have standards and guidelines for technology, and for policies as well as knowledge shared as good practice. The DCI is focused on technology/information systems for delivery of social protection. G2P payment delivery systems are a subset of the systems (technology) contributing to delivery of social protection programs. The payment delivery systems are the focus and in scope of G2PConnect with reference to the Social Protection sector.
How are G2P Connect and Gov Stack initiatives aligned?
- Gov Stack and G2P Connect leverage each other’s sandbox environments and collaborate on government-to-people use cases to showcase possibilities by collaborating with DPGs and/or other existing Products.
- The Gov Stack team shall also participate and collaborate on the G2P technical specifications published by G2P Connect.
How can the private sector be involved in G2P Connect’s work?
- Private sector players can be involved across the stages shown in the response above, ranging from leading deployments as system integrators to providing technical advisory services to countries in close collaboration with country core design during various stages of the engagement.
How does G2P Connect ensure rigorous technical standards?
- G2P Connect uses a rigorous assessment framework developed by an independent technical team to certify individual technology providers - both DPGs and proprietary - that wish to join the effort. This ensures an overall robust baseline solution.
What happens if G2P Connect is not actively improved and sustained in the future?
- from day one, all specs are CC-SA. All G2P Connect assets including blueprints, specifications, assessment guides, etc are all made available under Creative Commons – Attribution – Share Alike 4.0 (CC-BY-SA 4.0) license that allow adopters / implementers to fork the specification and evolve from there without disrupting adoption. The entire set of specifications is also open source. In case a country wants to drive any improvements, they can build on what is freely open and available, instead of having to rebuild. Thus, if the project is not active in future, all assets are still available for the community to continue to use and evolve freely.
