Resilience in Times of Crisis: Empowering Refugees with Self-Sovereign Identity

The Ukrainian refugee crisis, beginning in 2022, revealed challenges for both refugees and organizations in the Swiss asylum process. While refugees are faced with timeconsuming and cumbersome administrative tasks, involved authorities and organizations are overwhelmed with slow paper-based processes, redundant work, and wrong data. We propose a digital identity (eID) to mitigate these issues. The challenges of implementing a centralized identity, particularly given Switzerland's decentralization, led us to choose a Self Sovereign Identity (SSI) concept. Following a design science research approach, we iteratively developed a prototype and evaluated it with refugees and different organizations. Based on the analysis of collected feedback, we formulated design principles for SSI-based eID for refugees and described how these principles impact feasibility, refugees’ empowerment, and organizations’ efficiency. We formulated the main principles for refugee empowerment through three lenses: SSI - comprehensive, early-access digital wallet; eID - gradual increase in identification; and GaaP - open identity platform.