54 Middle East & Africa The EconomistDecember 7th 2019
T
he first thing that visitors to the
Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg
see is a wall of identity cards—the pieces of
paper that determined where people could
live and work and whom they could love.
From the outset, the apartheid regime’s
ability to discriminate against “nie-
blankes” (non-whites) depended on having
a robust system of identifying people.
The opposite problem confronts most
other countries in Africa today. Govern-
ments have little idea who their citizens
are. Around the world, about one billion
people lack official proof of their identi-
ties, reckons the World Bank. Such citizens
cannot, in many cases, get services such as
health care, welfare and education. They
also struggle to exercise their rights to vote
or live in their home countries. States need
this information, too. Without it, govern-
ments have no idea whom to tax, conscript
and protect, or where to allocate resources.
This is not just a poor-world problem.
Britain was recently rocked by the “Win-
drush” debacle, in which dozens of citizens
were wrongly deported. But it is a particu-
larly acute problem in sub-Saharan Africa,
where one in two people cannot prove his
or her identity. It is not for want of effort.
Every country in the region has either es-
tablished or plans to create a universal
identity programme.
Some countries, such as South Africa
and Botswana, have relatively good pro-
grammes that register most births and is-
sue papers to almost all of their people. At
the other end of the spectrum are countries
like Congo and Liberia, which are only just
getting started in registering births, never
mind issuing identity documents (see
map). In the middle are countries that are
upgrading from old, paper-based systems
to digital ones.
This is more complicated than it
sounds. Take Nigeria, which has 13 federal
and three state idschemes. The country’s
National Identity Management Commis-
sion (nimc), a body set up in 2007 with the
purpose of issuing identity numbers and
cards to Nigeria’s 180m people, has so far
reached less than a fifth of the population.
African countries struggle for several
reasons. One is racial discrimination.
Uganda, Liberia and Sierra Leone explicitly
withhold nationality from children of cer-
tain races and ethnicities. Other countries
do so informally by refusing to issue pa-
pers. Another reason is a failure by govern-ments to explain to their citizens how they
might benefit. Consider birth registration,
the most basic form of official identity.
South Asia more than doubled its rate of
birth registration to 71% between 2000 and- In sub-Saharan Africa the rate
dropped by one point, to 41%, over the
same period. For poor villagers, going to a
government office to register a birth is
time-consuming and expensive, especially
when officials demand bribes. Some coun-
tries charge a fee, which is a disincentive.
Others penalise late registrations.
One way to encourage people is to link
birth registration to benefits such as child-
support grants—something South Africa
did with great success. But that approach
may also have the perverse consequence of
denying payments to the very poorest.
Money is another reason many African
countries have fallen behind their peers.
Extending the state’s reach to remote areas
can be expensive. So, too, is paying for
skilled labour of the sort required to fill in
forms accurately and to operate biometric
machines. The technology itself is costly,
especially for small countries that do not
have much buying power.
Many governments have unwisely
bought proprietary systems, meaning that
they are forced to go back to the seller for
maintenance, upgrades and new compo-
nents. That can be expensive. When Nige-
ria’s nimc wanted to use its own card-
printing machines, the firm that had sold it
software tried to insist that Nigeria buy its
machines as well, says Tunji Durodola, an
adviser to the commission. (They eventu-
ally got help from Pakistan, which had soft-
ware that worked on any machine.)
But there are signs of change coming
from within the industry itself, spurred by
developments in an entirely different part
of the world: India. Like Africa, it is vast,
poor and home to more than a billion peo-
ple. Yet as a single country India has tre-
mendous negotiating power.
When India developed its “Aadhaar”
identity programme it invited leading
firms to bid—but with the caveat that they
provide open-source software, or code that
can be examined and changed by others.
This allowed engineers to knit together dif-
ferent bits of a system such as databases,
enrolment software, fingerprint scanners
and so on. The suppliers agreed because
they did not want to miss out on the biggest
identity bonanza the world had ever seen.
Moreover, India’s spending led to a big in-
crease in production, which caused prices
to fall across the industry.
The ripples of India’s big splash are now
lapping on Africa’s shores. Companies in-
cluding Idemia, Gemalto and De La Rue
have agreed to establish “open standards”.
This is one step short of open-source stan-
dards, but it is enough to allow different
bits of a system to talk to each other. That
would allow countries to buy the parts they
need from competing companies, giving
them greater flexibility at lower costs.
Eleven countries, including Uganda,
Congo, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Mali and Mada-
gascar, have signed up to an industry advi-
sory committee to develop these open
standards. “The industry has been almost
like a craft industry and now it’s moving to-
wards a commodity industry and standar-
disation,” says Alan Gelb of the Centre for
Global Development, a think-tank.
Even as governments think about the
technical problems of recording identity,
they also need to grapple with the far more
consequential ones around rights, gover-
nance and privacy. The starkest warning of
the misuse of identity was in the Rwandan
genocide, where idpapers listed ethnicity,
making it easy to target Tutsis. Since data
on religion and ethnicity are not needed to
provide services, governments should not
be hoovering it up, yet many still do.
States should also be wary of denying
people their rights by creating a class of
citizens without papers. In Kenya, for ex-
ample, the government wants everyone to
register for idcards, but it discriminates
against members of the Nubian minority
by forcing them to appear before a security
panel to prove their nationality. Modern
identity systems promise to bring many
benefits to Africa. But as they proliferate, so
too will the temptation for politicians to
misuse them. 7JOHANNESBURG
African countries are struggling to build robust identity systems. That may soon
change, thanks to help from an unlikely quarterIdentity documents in AfricaPapers, please
200 40 60Source: World Bank Group*Children aged 0-5 years80 100Undercount
Sub-Saharan Africa, birth registration*, %
2016 or latest availableLiberiaSierra
Leone Ghana
Ivory CoastMaliCongo
RwandaNigeriaKenyaMadagascarUgandaBotswanaSouth Africa