Civic Anchor
South Africa · POPIA-bound · Pre-launch

Your identity, verified once. Trusted everywhere.

We are building portable, cryptographic civic identity infrastructure for Southern Africa — designed from the ground up for the informal economy, the cross-border worker, and the institution that needs to trust them.

The problem we are solving

Millions of people across Southern Africa participate fully in the economy — as domestic workers, cross-border traders, stokvel members, informal employers — yet cannot prove who they are to a bank, a landlord, or a border post. Not because they are unknown, but because no system has ever been built to recognise them.

CivicAnchor is that system. A single cryptographic identity anchor that works at the bank, the border, the employer, and the community — for every persona, on the same stack. No plastic card. No government dependency. No nationality gate.

Four principles that make this different

These are architectural commitments baked into the design — not features we plan to add later.

  • Nationality-blind by construction

    No nationality, country-of-origin, or ID-type fields exist anywhere in the schema. The same flow serves every persona — citizen, asylum seeker, work-permit holder, undocumented.

  • Self-sovereign passkey control

    Your device holds the keys. CivicAnchor structurally cannot impersonate you, even if our own database is breached.

  • Progressive trust

    Every employer verification, peer attestation, and community relationship strengthens your civic claim — earned through participation, not granted by permission.

  • POPIA-bound by design

    No biometric templates stored — ever. Every design decision traces directly to a regulatory commitment we can defend in writing to the Information Regulator.

Partner with us

We are at pre-launch stage and actively looking for early partners — community organisations, development funders, civil society organisations, and institutions that serve people outside the formal system. We are not asking for money. We are asking for a conversation.

rodrick@civicanchor.co.za

Rodrick Makore · Founder · CivicAnchor

POPIA notice

CivicAnchor processes personal information under the Protection of Personal Information Act, 4 of 2013. We act as an Operator under written s55 agreements with every partner institution. Raw biometric data is not stored. To exercise your data subject rights — access, correction, objection, deletion — contact our Information Officer.

Information Officer
popi@civicanchor.id

Foundation governance

CivicAnchor's open standards and the public-interest layer are stewarded by the CivicAnchor Foundation, an independently-governed non-profit with an independent board majority, separate counsel, and a published Memorandum of Understanding with CivicAnchor Group Ltd. The Foundation can outlive any commercial operator of the network — including us.

Secured domains

civicanchor.co.za· POPIA jurisdiction
civicanchor.co.zw· DPDP jurisdiction
civicanchor.id· DID resolution
civicanchor.me· Personal identity