ID30 offers 7 recommendations for civil registration, legal ID

ID30 is looking for partners as it develops a set of recommendations for advancing legal identity and civil registration in countries with developing economies and infrastructure.

The draft of “7 Recommendations for an effective and sustainable digitalization of legal identity in low-setup countries” was shared by ID30 CEO Jaume Dubois in a LinkedIn post. The recommendations are presented in draft form with a request for feedback.

Dubois recommends that the health sector be engaged in the legal identity issuance progress by mandating registration of births by healthcare workers. Children brought in for routine vaccinations that are found to be unregistered could be brought into the system. Regulatory frameworks and support, in the form of funding and logistical help, should be provided by the government.

The primary educational system and local authorities regularly have contact with families that would enable them identify unregistered children, and facilitate their access to civil registration.

Community leaders can be involved in census operations, and different public and private sectors can be encouraged to facilitate identification for their potential users.

Interoperable civil status infrastructure should be established, and Dubois recommends a centralized national civil status database with an interoperability gateway to ease the ingestion of data.

Access to national ID cards is limited in many African countries, the document states, and should be improved to ease access to services. That may mean deploying registration centers more widely, running mobile and targeted campaigns, and increasing public awareness of the importance of holding a national ID. Digital means of tracking application requests should also be made available.

Finally, practical applications that can improve administrative procedures and reduce fraud will increase demand for civil registration and legal ID. Those applications can include online identity verification and document authentication services, and ID cards verifiable with smartphones. The same unique identifier can help with all administrative procedures and verifiable digital certificates or verifiable credentials can replace manual verifications.

Each recommendation is offered in general terms, so needs to be contextualized to each specific country.

Michel Chajes, civil registration director at Semlex, has responded with one further recommendation. He notes the need to coordinate “the interactions between the computerized civil registry and the biometric computerized national people register used to register people with biometrics data (fingerprints, face), assign unique identification number (UIN)) for each people, and deliver ID cards.”

Article Topics

civil registration  |  digital ID  |  digital identity  |  ID30  |  identity management  |  interoperability  |  legal identity  |  national ID  |  SDG 16.9