Community-Based Identification in Rural Banking

Abstract

Identity deals with answering the question of “who am I?” or who are you?”. It answers the question of who or what a person or thing is and deals with the characteristics determining this. In commercial transactions, identity is very important and various mechanisms have been devised to deal with this question. The question that needs answering is whether these conventional mechanisms can work in all situations. Most businesses in the developing countries lag behind their counterparts in the developed countries in terms of technology. To catch up they often adopt information technologies and business practices that are already in use. Adoption of these technologies is however affected by the culture of the relevant communities (Liljander, Gillberg, Gummerus, & van Riel, 2006) and the structures to support implementation of the technologies. This paper looks at the protection of the digital identity and propose identity management techniques more suitable to rural Ghana. It proposes an alternative identity verification mechanism which focuses on identity as a social construct.