Togo preparing census to issues biometric ID cards for social protection

A third population census is coming to Togo and the exercise will be dedicated to issuing biometric cards to citizens for social protection, according to the country’s President Faure Gnassingbé.

The Togolese leader was speaking recently in an interview granted to Lomé-based privately-owned New World TV in which he addressed several development and policy issues in the nation of nearly nine million citizens.

He was not specific on a new timeline for the project which had earlier been programmed to begin in last quarter of last year.

Togo has in the past few years embarked on the implementation of its digital transformation agenda to improve the way citizens obtain public services form government and even private entities.

The president explained that the enrolment for the social register will culminate in the issuance of a Unique Identification Number to every citizen in order to facilitate their access to different public and social services.

“We want to create a social register so that we can know our population very well. Let me use this opportunity to say that we have had a general census, we will have an electoral census, and there will be a third census to issue a biometric card to each and every Togolese. This will enable us to be more effective and efficient in the implementation of our social protection policy,” says Gnassingbé.

The project to set up a biometric database for unique IDs comes after the Togolese government last year approved a legislative amendment which introduced many novelties in line with its plans for a national digital ID scheme.

The legislation, among other things, empowers the National Identification Agency (ANID) to collect demographic and biometric data of Togolese necessary for setting up the foundational database of the country’s digital ID card project.

Togo’s national ID system will utilize MOSIP’s open-source platform, and was described in an ID4Africa livecast last year.

Article Topics

Africa  |  Agence Nationale de l’Identification (ANID)  |  biometrics  |  digital ID  |  digital identity  |  national ID  |  Togo