Mia Harbitz is an identity management professional with extensive project management experience in developing countries. She is the former Lead Specialist in identity management and registries with a focus on governance for the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), and is presently working as advisor to the World Bank’s Identity for Development (ID4D) initiative. Over the course of a 25-year career she has designed and managed development projects that modernized and strengthened the capacities of civil and identification registries with emphasis in Latin America. These projects contributed toward a significant increase in birth registration and civil identification as well as   improved the quality of national vital statistics systems. She has authored and contributed to numerous publications and books on legal identity, identity management, the implications of under-registration, and social inclusion as a means to poverty reduction. Her academic background is in engineering, and prior to coming to Latin America in 1991 she worked in development programs in East Africa and the Middle East.