DignityProof v1.0 — Integrated Framework, Technical Appendices, Case Studies, SDK, and Evidence Bundle System

 DignityProof v1.0 is an integrated, sovereign-grade framework for making social protection, humanitarian assistance, and basic-needs delivery verifiable, auditable, and reproducible from end to end.

This release consolidates the full documentation and reference implementation for the DignityProof stack:

• Integrated White Paper (v1.0, October 2025) — a conceptual and technical overview of the framework, including the problem statement, design principles, governance model, and high-level system architecture.

• Seven Technical Appendices — detailed specifications for the cryptographic layer, data governance and privacy controls, identity and appeals architecture, procurement and last-mile integrity, oracle and trigger design, evaluation blueprints and reproducibility, and risk, ethics and Active Exclusion Monitoring (AEM).

• Seven Protocol Case Studies — stylized, country-level protocol papers that show how DignityProof can be instantiated for nutrition, cash, housing, and climate-linked assistance across different settings (e.g. lean-season maternal nutrition, pre-indexed food assistance, drought-indexed cash, cyclone response, school meals and eviction risk). Each case study is written as a protocol for how to run and verify a program, not as an ex-post impact evaluation.

• Global Impact and Verification Paper — a conservative, simulation-based assessment of the potential aggregate impact of adopting DignityProof-style verifiable delivery systems at scale, focusing on: (i) reduced leakage and mis-targeting; (ii) faster detection of exclusion; (iii) improved procurement and pricing discipline; and (iv) higher credibility of results for citizens, auditors, and funders.

• Innovation Paper (Role of Innovations) — a cross-cutting analysis of the ten core innovations that distinguish DignityProof (e.g. commit-and-prove accounting, protocol-first case design, oracle governance, AEM, and sovereign-grade evidence bundles), and how they interact with existing humanitarian and development practice.

• Humanitarian Concordat (Compact) — a normative and governance document that aligns DignityProof with existing humanitarian standards and codes (e.g. Sphere, CHS, PSEA, data-responsibility guidance), and proposes a compact between implementing agencies, funders, and affected populations around verifiable delivery.

• Top 50 Anticipated Questions and Answers — a structured response to fifty likely questions from reviewers, agencies, ethics boards, and policymakers, covering methodology, ethics, governance, feasibility, and limitations.

• DignityProof SDK v1.0 (single-file Python SDK + examples) — a self-contained, standard-library-only reference implementation that provides:

  • A Merkle-sum style ledger for committed transfers and budgets.

  • An oracle and trigger registry for price, climate, and other public signals.

  • A policy-bound appeals engine.

  • Procurement integrity logging hooks.

  • An evaluation blueprint and reproducibility layer for trials and pilots.

  • A minimal AEM interface for summarising “who is being missed”.

  • An evidence-bundle builder that exports JSON bundles tying all of the above to a reproducible audit trail.

Together, these components are intended to serve as a complete, audit-ready starting point for researchers, agencies, and governments who wish to experiment with verifiable social-protection and humanitarian delivery, without embedding proprietary engines or confidential datasets.

Intended use and audience

DignityProof v1.0 is designed for:

• Researchers and evaluation teams who want a protocol-first, reproducible way to design trials and pilots that are auditable beyond a single paper.

• Humanitarian and social-protection agencies seeking stronger guarantees that funds, vouchers, and goods reach the intended populations, and that exceptions and overrides are governed fairly.

• Funders, multilaterals, and oversight bodies who require transparent, evidence-linked mechanisms to trust reported results, while respecting privacy and local regulations.

• Technologists and open-source contributors interested in extending the SDK with concrete cryptographic backends, integrations, or country-specific modules.

The SDK and examples in this release are intentionally minimal but structured: they show how the conceptual building blocks in the documentation can be wired into a working evidence-bundle system, while leaving room for stronger cryptography, domain-specific integrations, and local regulatory tailoring.

Modeled impact (simulation-based, not claims of realised lives saved)

The accompanying Global Impact and Verification paper and protocol case studies use transparent, conservative modeling and stylized simulations to explore the potential benefits of adopting DignityProof-style systems at scale.

Across the seven protocol scenarios, the modeling focuses on:

• Efficiency gains from reduced leakage, mis-targeting, and procurement slippage under stronger commit-and-prove accounting and procurement logging.

• Coverage and inclusion gains from Active Exclusion Monitoring (AEM) and explicit, auditable appeals.

• Timeliness improvements where oracles and pre-committed triggers allow earlier, rules-based activation in shocks (price spikes, droughts, cyclones).

• Trust and accountability gains from verifiable evidence bundles that can be independently recomputed by third parties.

The numbers in the impact paper are therefore scenario-based and model-based, derived from combinations of: (i) publicly documented baselines and ranges from the literature; (ii) stylized Monte-Carlo style simulations; and (iii) explicit, documented assumptions. They are intended as illustrative orders of magnitude to motivate careful piloting and formal evaluation — not as promises of guaranteed savings, benefits, or lives saved in any specific country or program.

Reproducibility and open science

This release follows open-science and reproducible-research practices:

• All conceptual modules are documented in the integrated white paper and appendices.

• The SDK provides deterministic hashing, stable JSON encodings, and clear extension points for integration with containers, registries, and external proof systems.

• The documentation anticipates pre-registration, pre-analysis plans, and publication of anonymised code and instruments for any actual pilots run on top of DignityProof.

• Licences are structured so that the documentation is reusable under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, while the SDK and code are provided under Apache 2.0 to facilitate experimentation, extension, and integration.

Disclaimer: protocol-only, synthetic scenarios, and no real-world impact claims

This Zenodo record is a research and design package, not an operational reporting system.

1. Protocol papers, not ex-post evaluations.
   The seven “case studies” are written as protocol papers: they describe how one could design, govern, and evaluate programs if they were implemented with DignityProof. They are not after-the-fact evaluations of real programs and should not be read as such.

2. Synthetic and stylised data throughout.
   All quantitative examples, trajectories, and tables in the protocol case studies and impact paper are synthetic, stylised, or scenario-based. They do not use confidential beneficiary data, do not represent any specific household or individual, and do not report on an actual implementing agency’s books or operational databases.

3. No direct claims of realised impact, savings, or lives saved.
   Any numbers on “efficiency gains”, “coverage improvements”, “uplift”, or similar are modeled projections under explicit assumptions, not measurements of realised savings or lives saved in a real deployment. They must not be interpreted as guaranteed outcomes, promises, or performance claims for any government, agency, or program.

4. No operational deployment implied.
   Inclusion of a country, region, hazard, or population group in a protocol paper or scenario does not imply that DignityProof is currently deployed there, endorsed by local authorities, or associated with any existing program. All such instances are illustrative design exercises.

5. Not a substitute for legal, ethical, or operational due diligence.
   This package does not constitute legal advice, does not replace formal ethical review, and does not remove the need for rigorous operational risk assessment. Any real-world deployment of ideas inspired by DignityProof must undergo its own governance, legal, ethical, data-protection, and contextual review, and must be evaluated on its own merits.

By using, citing, or extending this work, you acknowledge that:

• It is a research-oriented framework and SDK,

• Its case studies are hypothetical protocols and synthetic scenarios, and

• Any real-world impact will depend entirely on how independent teams design, implement, govern, and evaluate their own pilots and programs.