Liberia says national ID system drives digital economy, facilitates service delivery

The Director of Media Relations at Liberia’s National Identification Registry (NIR) says the national ID system is central to the country’s digital economy efforts and partnerships have been an important factor in driving adoption of the card.

Daniel Sloh Sargbe was speaking during a press briefing this week in Monrovia in which he gave updates about the NIR’s work and its ambitions for the near future, Front Page Africa reports.

According to Sargbe, although their principal mandate is to register Liberians into a national ID system, they also have an important role to play in creating the enabling environment for the country’s digital transformation can be accelerated.

“We are not just enrolling people into a system, we are creating a foundation for the future of Liberia’s digital economy,” the official said as quoted.

He noted that as of December last year, NIR had registered around 740,000 citizens for the national ID program, thanks largely to partnerships which the ID authority has with different national institutions as well as international partners such as UNICEF. He mentioned that the registrants are between the ages of 31 and 65 years old, 59 percent of which are male. NIR has reported lethargy in national ID registration in the past.

Now, Sargbe said one of the partnerships that have driven the adoption of the national ID card is NIR’s Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Civil Service Agency, signed in May last year, which makes it possible for the National Identification Numbers (NINs) of civil servants to be used for payroll verification. Ethiopia is also using its digital ID to identify civil servants.

Apart from enhancing the delivery of administrative and other services to Liberian civil servants, the NIR Director of Media Relations said the integration of the NINs with NIR’s e-verification portal has also contributed enormously to identifying ghost workers who have been draining the government payroll.

Sargbe also spoke of another important MoU which NIR signed with the Liberian Telecommunications Authority (LTA), making the national ID card a requirement for SIM card registration.

Signed in October last year, Sargbe said the partnership “is essential for the country’s digital transformation and the integration of ICT systems to improve public services.”

The NIR official also mentioned other partnerships which have influenced ID adoption in different ways such as those with the Ministry of Gender, Children, and Social Protection to issue ID cards for social protection schemes, and with UNICEF for the registration of children below the age of five into the National Biometric Identification System (NBIS).

Work, he said, is ongoing on a World Bank-supported project dubbed Governance Reformed and Accountability Transformation (GREAT), which aims to increase registration of persons in the NBIS.

Cognizant of the importance of the national ID, Liberia’s President Joseph Boakai, early last year, called on the NIR to expand its the national ID database and to lead an aggressive ID enrollment campaign.

Article Topics

Africa  |  biometrics  |  digital economy  |  digital ID  |  government services  |  identity verification  |  Liberia  |  national ID  |  National Identification Registry (NIR)