DR Congo fights public service waste with biometric ID registry

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) has been implementing a project that seeks to help the government know exactly how many public servants are on its payroll in order to curb waste and bureaucratic red tape.

Supported by technical teams from the World Bank, the project titled Enhancing Collection of Revenue and Expenditure Management (ENCORE) has seen the setting up of a biometric civil service registry and the issuance of biometric identification cards to all registered public servants.

According to a World Bank blog post, the project which was launched in January by the country’s Prime Minister, Judith Saminwa, has already yielded significant results as field-level teams have crossed the length and breath of the vast Central African country handing over biometric cards to enrolled civil servants.

ENCORE is a project that was approved in 2021 by the World Bank with a commitment financing of $250 million. It is expected to run till December 31, 2026.

The Bank says the project fits into its broader efforts of fighting poverty and waste around the world, given that DR Congo is one of Africa’s most populated countries, with a significant number of its citizens living in abject poverty.

The project, implemented by the country’s Ministry of Civil Service and the Steering Committee for Public Finance Reform (COREF), is aimed at streamlining the management of public service workers and to help save up huge sums of money which have been paid over the years to people who do not work for the government for various reasons.

The blog mentions that the project is even more pertinent given that about 40 percent of the country’s total public spending is dedicated to the payment of public servants, meaning that closing that wage fraud gap could lead to huge savings which can be channelled in to priority development projects for the country.

With a streamlined and cleaned up database, the government has issued more than 118,000 biometric identification cards to civil servants in all of the country’s 26 administrative provinces.

The system is expected to be updated yearly, and an integration of a payroll management and human resource system also planned in the near future.

As part of its digital transformation plans, the government of DR Congo has also contracted Singaporean firm Trident to build a national digital ID and digital government architecture for the country to revolutionize how public and even private sector services are delivered. The DRCPass digital ID was recently launched as the project gets off to a serious start.

Article Topics

biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  civil registration  |  Democratic Republic of Congo  |  digital ID  |  identity management  |  workforce management  |  World Bank