São Tomé and Principe pilots MOSIP-based national digital ID system

São Tomé and Principe, Africa’s second smallest country by area and population, with just around a thousand square kilometres and under 240,000 people, is conducting a pilot for a national digital ID system based on the Modular Open-Source Identity Platform (MOSIP).

This is according to Elissandro Kelman Torres, a Systems Analyst from the country’s Justice Ministry and spokesperson of their delegation at this year’s ID4Africa event in Ethiopia.

Torres told Biometric Update in an interview that the government is poised for an inclusive digital ID system that is anchored on a solid birth registration foundation, and they believe MOSIP is the right platform on which to build it.

“We have already started discussing and working on digital ID implementation. Currently, we are in the pilot phase with MOSIP. We came here to learn more about how a good digital ID system works,” Torres said.

The next phase

He said the pilot has been going on well, and they are already looking forward to a nationwide rollout although a clear timeline is not known yet.

“The process is going on well. We have a good impression of MOSIP, which is why we’ve decided to move ahead with its implementation. We did face some challenges in fully understanding the technology at the start. But overall, it is good, and we are looking at how to move into the next phase, that is full-scale deployment,” Torres disclosed.

“We don’t have a fixed timeline yet, but we’re taking the first steps as best we can. That’s why we began last year with the pilot, but we hope that within one or two years, we would have made substantial progress in implementing the digital ID system.”

Emphasizing the place of civil registration in the national digital ID project, the official affirmed that “we started with civil registration.”

According to the World Bank, the central African country located in the Gulf of Guinea had about 98 percent of its population with a birth certificate as of 2023, an achievement made possible by factors such as robust digitization efforts, major legal reforms and interoperability and service integration.

As part of the country’s digital transformation plan, Torress said they are also looking forward to putting in place a digital government system which can connect institutions and streamline how citizens get access to public services.

“We already have a good system that can capture all citizens’ data, but we need all institutions to be connected in order to help us also develop a national digital government system. That’s what we aim to achieve in the future,” he indicated.

MOSIP solution for small nations

MOSIP President, Prof S. Rajagopalan, in an interview with Biometric Update at the close of MOSIP Connect last year, said one of their objectives was to design customized solutions for countries with really small populations like Sao Tome and Principe.

“There are countries with less than one million population, some island nations. Comoros for example. We also have Belize which is not an island nation but a very small country. We have to think about solutions for small countries. Can the system implemented in Philippines which is 110 million people or Morrocco which is 36 million, be done in a country with less than 350,000 people? Per capita cost will go up and countries may not be able to afford,” the MOSIP leader said then.

He added: “Our immediate focus is going to be on how to bring a solution on identity for very small countries. We are trying to see how we can bring down the cost of issuing ID for those small nations. They too want to use digital technology. We can’t say because they have just 200,000 people, they should be left out of digital technology.”

In 2023, Sao Tome and Principe was listed among ten African counties earmarked to benefit from a digital trade and digital payments project funded by the African Development Bank.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  civil registration  |  digital identity  |  ID4Africa  |  ID4Africa 2025  |  legal identity  |  MOSIP (Modular Open Source Identity Platform)  |  national ID  |  São Tomé and Principe