Biometrics experience, policy and tools must converge to transform lives

Biometrics and technologies for issuing, sharing and delivering services with identity credentials shared the stage with practical, real-world experiences and policy recommendations this week at ID4Africa 2025.

Speakers from dozens of African governments, development agencies like the World Bank and UNDP, and biometrics providers from Toppan and Tech5 to FaceTec offered insights and debated how best to handle common challenges.

ID4Africa 2025 AGM

The ID4Africa 2025 AGM, held this past week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, appears to have been the largest ID-centric event ever held in the world’s Southern hemisphere.

“The acceleration is very promising, but it’s not across the board, and it’s not across all domains,” ID4Africa Executive Chairman Dr. Joseph Atick told Biometric Update in an exclusive sideline interview at the event’s conclusion. “The acceleration is quite a bit in the domain of digital identity. And the reason there’s an urgency is because the world is a small village now; people get online, people are on social media, and they see what digital identity can do for their brothers and sisters in other countries. They knock on the doors of the politicians, and they apply pressure.”

Leadership has become sensitized, and what was once more of a top-down mandate has shifted to be more of a popular demand, Atick says.

Delegations from countries that are further behind are asking “How do we catch up?”

Sharing advances and how they were achieved is an annual theme of the event, and the host country led off the good news reports with a reiterated commitment to race towards universal coverage with the Fayda ID program by 2027 through collaboration. PM Abiy Ahmed leant weight to the opening ceremonies with an address reminding attendees that “the true measure of success is not in the number of systems built, but in the lives transformed.” Watch for Biometric Update’s in-depth interview with NIDP ED Yodahe Zemichael from on-location in the weeks ahead.

Benin, Malawi, Mauritania, Tanzania, and Somalia also shared advice and inspiration on ID4Africa 2025 day 1, and later in the day Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya presented their experiences in making ID systems economically sustainable.

IN Groupe CEO Agnes Diallo also spoke on day 1, in the wake of winning an €8.5M digital ID contract with Madagascar.

Civil registration, however, is too often being pushed aside in the rush to respond to the grass-roots pressure for digital identity, according to Atick. He referred to sobering projections from UNICEF shared during the first day of the program on the pace of civil and birth registration.

Decentralization, which becomes more feasible with digital transformation, can help, he believes, but the health sector “has a very important role to play,” if the right institutional arrangements can be made. Health and civil registration have overlapping goals, and people without legal identity may not be able to get the healthcare they need.

Civil registration and digital ID can also be twinned for acceleration. Atick says he is advising countries to consider CR, digital ID and services as a “trinity.”

“Unless you get these three things working together, your digital identity ecosystem will not work.”

Digital public services should be the target, not the issuance of cards, Atick says. And making them useful means moving beyond pilots and PoCs to reach scale.

There are reasons to be optimistic that these changes might be in store, though, too.  The interest of legislators in facilitating them has exceeded Atick’s expectations he says.

ID4Africa has shared IESEF results with lawmakers and other officials, reinforcing the urgency they take from hearing the stories of the continent’s most advanced identity systems.

Atick recounts that an ID4Africa Ambassador was flown home to brief the country’s President after the third day of the event.

Cracking the capacity challenge

The urgency means that while capacity is building, “you have to do strategic deployment” of that already available to maximize productivity.

“At what level do you deploy your capacity?  I think deploying it at the source code level is too low. You need to deploy it at the modular level” and with applications, as was seen at the Upanzi Network-organized hackathon.

Continual recruitment can help, but the private sector can always poach talent from the public sector, Atick cautions.  This is part of the reason that leveraging the private sector is so important. Ghana’s 15-year public-private partnership puts many capacity concerns to rest, Atick says. PPP’s often “smell,” he acknowledges, but NIA ES Kenneth Attafuah told Atick during the event “we’re beyond that stage,” pointing to the prosecution and jail time of his own nephew for failing to uphold the country’s transparency and governance standards.

Limited, controlled PPPs can help provide the lift still needed by so many nations to achieve their identity goals, while also leaving room for local providers. AI can also help with productivity, Atick suggests.

ID4Africa itself has increased its staff count by only one since 2019, even as the AGM has more than doubled in size, Atick says, by making more efficient use of the capacity it has. The same approach must be taken by country’s catching up on ID.

Technical tools can also help, and visible digital seals that can reduce the price of an individual credential to the cost of a piece of paper and ink were one of the technologies in the spotlight during in Addis.

Biometric Update reports from ID4Africa 2025

Reporting by Ayang Macdonald, Lu-Hai Liang, and Chris Burt

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Article Topics

biometrics  |  civil registration  |  digital ID  |  digital identity  |  government services  |  ID4Africa  |  ID4Africa 2025  |  legal identity  |  SDG 16.9