Digital Identification in Africa

Digital identification is one of the central elements of digital transformation, and governments, civil society and development actors are paying increasing attention to it.

At the industry’s leading conference for digital identity in Cape Town, South Africa, ID4Africa on May 21st-24th, over 2,000 exhibitors, governments, and civil society representatives gathered to discuss how digital identification could empower and enable choice. Joseph Atick, the visionary behind ID4Africa, has established the convening as the continent’s premier forum for thinking about digital identification and development.

It was a privilege to attend the forum, supporting UNDP’s efforts around Model Governance Frameworks and UNHCR’s efforts to ensure refugee inclusion, and to explore the implications of digital identity and wallets for migrants. I was left thinking about three key themes:

The conference tagline was ‘digital ID as DPI’, and there was much discussion of the importance of digital ID not only an end in itself, but as an enabler. In practice, this means that efforts prioritising ‘public interest’ and ‘public value’ are increasingly prominent. These include efforts such as MOSIP, a non-profit open source ID solution that establishes an interoperable ecosystem, with increasing numbers of vendors advertising their ‘MOSIP Compliance’. Private vendors were also promoting interoperability through the OSIA standard, now an officially adopted by the ITU. There were also normative efforts around public interest of digital digital identity, such as UNDP and the United Nations Office of the Secretary General’s Envoy on Technology (OSET) convening on how to ensure that DPI is safe, inclusive and rights protecting.

Yet, despite this growing attention, there’s still a lot of questions about what DPI actually means and what it looks like. As Hilda Barasa of the Tony Blair Institute noted following the UNDP and OSET consultation, there’s a lack of clarity about what DPI means. Even with some established definitions, it’s still not clear to many in the international development community how to distinguish ‘vanilla’ digital transformation from a ‘DPI approach’, and how DPI relates to earlier lessons learned, strategies, and thinking about DPI. I think this is really critical if the current momentum is to be maintained and translated into impact. As a firm believer in evidence and specificity, at Caribou Digital going to invest in efforts to advance this clarity.

There was much conversation around wallets as the ‘next thing’ in digital ID innovation. Digital wallets are digital versions of the wallet you hold in your pocket or purse — a way to store digital documents so that people who need to rely on them as proof of an entitlement or status can trust them. There are many reasons for the growing interest in digital wallets — from promising to simplify the management of credentials to giving individuals greater control over their credentials and data.

Perhaps the biggest driver of interest in digital wallets comes from the EC’s adoption of a new digital identity regulation, eIDAS2.0, that specifies a digital wallet and mandates all member countries to provide one to citizens. This has prompted speculation about whether the EC’s new standard may define a new global standard for identification — a ‘Brussels effect’ that pushes this particular approach to digital identification on others.

But digital wallets also introduce new challenges. In 2022 only 81% of the EU population had a smartphone, while across Africa only 41% had access to any phone. So questions of exclusion are increasingly important, not just in terms of access to technology, but also access to the legal credentials and status that underpin wallets. For example, it may have significant implications for marginalised and vulnerable populations, such as migrants and refugees. UNHCR, the UN agency responsible for refugees, has already developed a digital wallet, which we’re currently researching related to migrants’ identification needs in Kenya and Germany.

Empowerment and choice was another important theme of the conference. At first this seemed to refer to empowerment and choice for individuals, as wallets are promised to enable. But throughout the conference it became clear that this theme is also about governments and their capacity to choose an approach to digital identification that meets their needs. As one senior figure put it, many countries feel that they have particular systems, approaches, and ways of thinking about digital identification imposed on them. In a conference panel of parliamentarians convened by UNDP there was resistance to this imposition, and a strong call for greater recognition of their role in the process of establishing digital identification — as representatives of their citizens, ‘we need to be involved’, and asked for more support to empower their capacity to choose their own approach to digital identification.

I think this was significant for two reasons. Firstly, recognising government and institutions as users of ID systems highlights questions of sovereignty — the right to choose and assert authority — and of responsibility and accountability. This year’s conference marked the first time civil society organisations participated; they shared stories of holding their governments to account through advocacy and the judiciary. This highlights the importance of national sovereignty and individual civic rights.

Second, digital identification is increasingly one of the fields in which geopolitics are played out. Technologies, standards, and governance models are manifestations of ideas, values, and interests. The competing definitions of DPI are one example, but so too is the close relation that many vendors of ID systems have or claim to have with states, like Thales from France, NEC from Japan, and Veridos from Germany.

So I think this is only the beginning of calls from African governments and civil society to strengthen their capacity to understand and choose digital systems and governance approaches that meet their needs. It will be incumbent on development partners to support them to make decisions and choices that reflect their needs.