Building the trust layer a continent can rely on.
Civic Anchor exists to give every African institution a single, trustworthy answer to one question — who, and what, am I dealing with — without ever compromising the people on the other side of that question.
The mission
Trust, made portable across borders.
Half a billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa cannot prove who they are. The continental free-trade area asks 1.4 billion people and millions of businesses to trade across borders they cannot yet verify across. The gap between those two facts is the largest trust-infrastructure opportunity in the world.
Civic Anchor closes it from the ground up — a verified identity anchored to the holder’s own device, a marketplace where institutions verify against it with consent, and the open standards that let the whole thing cross borders. We aim to become the layer no African bank, telco, marketplace, customs office, or regulator can plausibly route around.
How we are organised
An operating group, and an independent Foundation.
The structure is deliberate: the company that builds and operates the rails is kept structurally separate from the body that stewards the public-interest standards.
Civic Anchor Group
The operating company. It runs a regulated subsidiary in each market — its own legal entity, regulator relationship, and data-residency partition — so every country is answerable to its own framework. The Group builds the substrate, the marketplace, and the data products.
The Civic Anchor Foundation
An independent, public-interest body that stewards the open standards and the digital-identity specifications. Its independence is what lets the standards be cited and adopted royalty-free — and what keeps the public-interest layer durable.
Visit the FoundationWhat we hold to
The commitments behind the architecture.
These are not slogans — each one shows up as a property of the system or a line in the strategy we hold ourselves to.
The person is the asset, never the product
Civic Anchor does not charge the people it verifies, and it does not sell their data. The economics run through the institutions that benefit from trust — never through extracting from the individual.
Integrate, don’t replace
We work with national ID systems, regulators, and existing institutions — not against them. Civic Anchor sits under the systems that already exist and makes them interoperable.
Software, not plastic
No cards, no kiosks, no hardware lock-in. Identity lives on the device the holder already owns, which is what makes it reachable at continental scale.
Open where it earns trust
The schemas, the resolver protocol, and the standards are published openly. The value is captured at the implementation layer — not by keeping the protocol secret.
Build infrastructure that outlasts you.
We hire engineers, regulator-relations leads, and partnership builders who want to work on something permanent. If that’s you, tell us what you’d build.
Partner with Civic Anchor.
Institutions, regulators, and investors who want to help build the identity layer for Africa — start the conversation here.