Child PPa.
Technological solution to provide digital identity to unidentified minors.
What is Child PPa.
Child PPa is a technological solution that allows organizations in the humanitarian sector to protect unidentified minors, register their identity with high accuracy and manage their data in a more efficient, transparent and secure way.
It is an app linked to a multi-factor biometric recognition software (facial, finger and palm print). It enables highly reliable identification of minors, increasing the efficiency of work with them and improving their protection.
It is an easy-to-use and easy-to-carry solution to make it affordable for all types of organizations and to reach the maximum number of beneficiaries.



Detected need:
Problems in identification and inefficiency in the protection work of street children in India.
Solution:
Creation of a user-friendly tool that allows social organizations to register their beneficiaries with high accuracy and manage their data efficiently, transparently and securely.
Technology that makes a difference for vulnerable children
High precision
Child PPa works with a biometric engine that reads, among others, the venous pattern of the hands, which does not vary since childhood, making our solution the best on the market for programs aimed at children.
Portable
The PPa child mobile kit stores locally the information needed to operate in the field. Mobile kits synchronize upon gaining connectivity, prompting the user to manage duplicate or mismatched content.
Affordable
The reuse, adaptation and improvement of technologies already existing in the market and the collaboration with different organizations allow us to offer sophisticated solutions at an affordable price for social entities.
Projects and Use Cases.
10 million children live alone on the streets of India, prey to disease, malnutrition and child trafficking mafias that take advantage of their inability to provide their identity to exploit them through labor, sexual abuse, organ trafficking and drugs. Every day 174 children disappear in the country.
ChildMISS is a network of over 80 NGOs interoperating to identify and protect street children in India. We partnered with Don Bosco Youth at Risk since 2017 to increase their impact through technological innovation.
Child PPa was co-created with Don Bosco, piloted in New Delhi and Bangalore and we are currently scaling the solution to other cities.
According to a Human Rights Watch study, there are more than 150,000 unprotected and exploited talibé children in Senegal.
We are working with a network of NGOs in Senegal interested in creating an accurate database to improve programs and policies for the protection of talibé children, to enable interoperability between social entities and the government.
A pilot was conducted in 2019 to validate the technology and, following its success, we are currently working with the support of Unicef Lab Spain to involve public institutions to the project.
En Sierra Leona sólo 3M de personas están registradas de l
In Sierra Leone only 3M people are registered out of a total population of over 7M.
Hundreds of children are exposed daily to a multitude of abuses, especially girls, that could be avoided if they were legally registered.
We are in the process of implementing Child PPA together with the Ministry of Child Protection and several NGOs in the country to make prevention and child protection work more effective and efficient by improving networking, technology, security and data reliability.
The technology has already been installed and we are in the training phase to launch the pilot in September 2021.
os más de 7M de población total.
Cientos de niños están expuestos diariamente a multitud de abusos, especialmente las niñas, que podrían evitarse si estuvieran legalmente registrados.
Estamos en proceso de implantar Child PPA junto con el Ministerio de Protección de la Infancia y varias ONG del país para que la labor de prevención y protección de la infancia sea más eficaz y eficiente, mejorando la conexión en red, la tecnología, la seguridad y la fiabilidad de los datos.
Ya se ha instalado la tecnología y estamos en la fase de formación para poner en marcha el piloto en septiembre de 2021.
All children have the right to a legal identity, but a quarter of the children born today do not “officially” exist. Providing them with a digital identity document at birth could make them visible and facilitate their access to social and health services and, of course, better protection against abuse. However, biometrics are not accurate for babies, which is why birth registration remains a challenge around the world. Following the good results of palm vein recognition in infants, we have now partnered with the Child Health Foundation and Ayudame3D to design and print a new guide to be able to collect the palm pattern of infants and conduct a research study on the reliability of ChildPPa in infants together with the Child Health Foundation research team and several hospitals in Spain, and eventually also in India and Senegal.
Prizes and awards.
The EU Prize for Women Innovators celebrates the women entrepreneurs behind game-changing innovations. Arancha Martinez, Child PPa founder, received this recognition because of the innovation, impact and inspiration Child PPa represents.
UNICEF Lab Demo Day champion 2020 as best social innovation project for child protection.
Humanitarian Technology award 2019, which promotes the humanitarian use of technology in order to build a better world.
World Summit Award champion 2020 as one of the best 40 technological solutions worldwide to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
Recognition go!ODS 2020 for its contribution towards the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 1: End of poverty.
Connecting for Good award for best social TIC 2017. Thanks to the award, the project was presented in the Mobile World Congress 2018.
Project ecosystem.











In the media.
- La Sexta
- Libertad Digital
- Fundación SERES
- iSocial Foundation
- Fundación Princesa Girona
- Economía de hoy
Frequently asked questions.
- 2017. Research on the reliability of biometrics in minors and other groups such as migrants, refugees or victims of trafficking to ensure scalability of the project.
- 2018. Pilot in India in 5 centers of the ChildMiss network.
- 2019. Pilot in Senegal in collaboration with Coopera ONDG and Maison de la Gare in St Louis, Senegal + Support for the creation of a Child Protection network in Sierra Leone with Child Heroes and Don Bosco Fambul.
- 2020. Stoppage of pilots due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Learning process and incorporation of tool improvements.
- 2023. Development of version 2.0 of the tool by AWS + implementation of the new version in the network of centers in India.
The big problem of identity.
There are around 166 million “invisible” children under 5 years of age in the world, without something as basic as identity (UNICEF, 2019) This prevents them from accessing a number of basic rights and resources for health, education or social support.
Even when registered, 237 million children under 5 lack a birth certificate (1 in 3).
Child PPa is a social venture led by it-willbe.org, designed in collaboration with multiple stakeholders with the shared mission of making every child in the world visible to count.
In India, more than 10 million minors live on the streets, victims of disease, malnutrition and human trafficking mafias. In addition, these minors usually have no documentation to prove their identity, so the system itself leaves them outside the government’s health care or education networks.
If they disappear in the hands of a mafia, it doesn’t matter, they didn’t exist either…