African speakers at ID4Africa double in reflection of digital ID progress

ID4Africa’s annual general meeting has grown every year, in terms of the size of the program and the number of attendees. The 2025 AGM, though, stands out in featuring the most ever speakers from Africa, with the total number more than doubling. This marked increase mirrors the progressive maturity of legal and digital identity programs in countries across the continent.

The program is “a reflection of the current reality not only in Africa but in the development agenda,” ID4Africa Executive Chairman Dr. Joseph Atick tells Biometric Update in an interview.

It is informed by “a level of research that has not been done before,” Atick says. “Not only by us but by our development agency partners.”

Every speaker was interviewed as ID4Africa made selections to fill the limited number of spots available from the huge number of applicants.

“There are many different currents,” Atick says. “There are many different approaches that are competing and vying and using all sorts of influence to try to push one direction versus the other. Our position of neutrality creates a responsibility on our shoulders,” particularly as a big player.

Atick describes that responsibility as entailing both ensuring that all community voices are represented, but also that each voice is sharing a real and important story about the progress of the identity for development agenda in Africa.

As in past year’s ID4Africa’s 2025 AGM, May 20-23, 2025 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia will include the perspectives of African governments, civil society groups, the development agencies that support their efforts and the private sector. “Every group has its own interest, but they need to be brought together towards a common interest,” Atick explains.

ID4Africa worked closely with its 48 country bureaus to capture a snapshot of the state of legal and digital identity in each.

The research was carried out in part through the Identity Ecosystem Self-Evaluation Framework (IESEF), developed by ID4Africa in collaboration with the bureaus. The IESEF consists of 140 indicators across 12 domains, which collectively reflect the country’s progress on ID.

Part of the end result is a quantitative measure of progress by each country in each domain, which helped inform speaker selections based on local success and expertise. The same data can also help development agencies target their initiatives to the specific areas in particular countries that need the most work.

‘Buzzing with progress’

One of the findings is that there is plenty of success from which to draw lessons. “Africa is buzzing with progress and activities,” Atick says.

There were speakers from 39 officials from about 20 different African governments on last year’s program. This year, there will be 84 speakers representing over 30 African countries, reflecting Africa’s talent, as well as the diversity of countries’ needs and approaches.

The topics, likewise, are based on “real-world experience” from practitioners who “can teach the world what we would consider the best practical experience for implementing digital identity in the most hostile and the most unforgiving environments,” Atick says. “And its impressive just to think about the ingenuity that Africa has.”

“In a way, this is the year of coming out.”

This emphasis on African leadership also means a shift from theoretical to applied insights, or as Atick describes it, “knowledge you can use because it has been proven in the field.”

The program again will last four days, but Atick says that they are equivalent to seven days, because of the parallel tracks on days two and three. Day three will feature a symposium on legal identity, another on digital identity, and a third track on digital public goods and digital public infrastructure. The latter includes the conclusion of the second round of hackathons hosted by Carnegie Mellon University Africa’s Upanzi Network and MicroSave Consulting.

The volume of choices for attendees has led ID4Africa to build an AI tool into its platform to make suggestions based on their areas of interest and responsibility. “We have to help people find their way through it,” Atick says.

Collaboration will also be important for each country’s delegation to maximize the insights they can take from the program.

And maximizing is central part of the event’s overall theme, “Digital Identity at Scale: Prioritizing Use, Accelerating Impact.”

‘Digital Identity at Scale’

“It’s so easy to create pilots. And we have had, in the past five years, so many pilots.” But many of those fail to advance. So; what are the differences between those that fail and those that scale up to full populations? The question will be asked repeatedly at ID4Africa 2025, Atick says.

Prioritizing use is the second part of the theme, reflecting the interest in using digital identity to enable better delivery of the services Africans want to improve. Recognizing that interest is part of ID4Africa’s “bottom-up approach,” according to Atick.

“We believe in stating with the problems that are faced by Africa, looking for commonalities between them, and then bootstrapping upwards to see if there are any assets that can be generated from these common problems, that we can put the right governance round them, and start sharing them as digital public infrastructure.”

DPI is therefore something that arrives in the later stages of the program, as a methodology that is a by-product of addressing problems and use cases, rather than a starting point.

The financial services, health and mobility use cases are driving African interest in legal identity, which means civil registration. Atick characterizes the continent’s progress on civil registration as “very good . . . finally.” That progress allows the conversation on civil registration to move on to thorny topics like statelessness.

Digitalization can sometimes eliminate the workaround that desperate people use to overcome exclusion, Atick notes.

Governance will be another theme of ID4Africa 2025, and the event will bring together what Atick calls the largest gathering of African data protection and privacy authorities for a forum conducted in partnership with the World Privacy Forum on day three.

The AGM will also address a concept Atick calls “from data to dignity,” which describes an approach to making digital identity a tool for realizing human rights, rather than a barrier to them. Doing so means engaging with civil society and other stakeholders, who Atick calls “partners in progress.” A workshop on the final day of the 2025 AGM under the same name focusses on this process.

The elimination of vetting in Kenya is an example, and was prompted by conversations between communities brought together by ID4Africa in 2023, Atick says.

The idea is to create an engagement model that is more productive than using the courts as a first recourse.

“We find good intentions on everybody’s part,” Atick says, “but they don’t speak the same language and their motivations are very different.”

Different motivations and political circumstances also pose a barrier to interoperability, and Atick notes this is a challenge for efforts led by the African Union to promote free movement across borders. The AU will be part of the ID4Africa 2025 program, and also hold a pre-AGM meeting to work on interoperability.

Interoperability cannot simply be prescribed, though, Atick cautions. Countries are more likely to arrive at similar enough systems that making them interoperable is a small feat by following best practices.

National agendas for identity still take priority over the pan-African agenda, which should come from convergence, as the bureaus have made clear. “De facto” is more likely to be the methodology for arriving at interoperability than the political approach followed in Europe, Atick says, since Africa does not have the 30 years eIDAS took to develop and implement.

Along the way, more strategic capacity-building will be needed. This is another area in which the ID4Africa 2025 AGM agenda is designed to reflect on-the-ground realities.

The overall message from Atick is a positive one, however, based on real maturation, a sense of agency, and a desire to collaborate.

“What I’m seeing on people’s faces in Africa is a sense that ideas are flowing,” he says. “Ideas are generating more ideas.”

Stability remains necessary, and politics often poses an unnecessary hurdle to identity systems in Africa, including politics in countries outside of Africa that could affect the funding available for international development.

But Africa has reached an inflection point, Atick says, by moving past the uncertainty and reliance on assistance toward an embrace of local ingenuity and sovereignty.

“One of the countries that we’ll be featuring on the program is a country that has made the decision that they’re not going to rely on external funding. They’re going to rely on new models of, basically, creating private-public partnerships,” and the agenda will show “stunning success” with a new approach.

Overall, Atick promises ID4Africa’s 2025 AGM will reflect the realities of the identity for development agenda more faithfully than any event ever before.

Biometric Update will report on the 2025 ID4Africa AGM on location from Addis Ababa.

Article Topics

Africa  |  biometrics  |  digital ID  |  digital identity  |  Dr. Joseph Atick  |  ID4Africa  |  ID4Africa 2025  |  Identification for Development (ID4D)