Brownfield implementations represent MOSIP’s next wave of national digital IDs

The origin story of the Modular Open-Source Identity Platform is inextricably tied to the widely-observed problem of vendor lock-in in the biometrics and identity industry. But most of the early launches of MOSIP-based civil registration and digital ID programs on the platform have been carried out to provide something that wasn’t there before – greenfield implementations.

That is changing. While many of the countries rolling out MOSIP or carrying out pilots are doing so to provide national digital identity to people who have never had one before, the number of those countries remaining is dwindling.

Brownfield implementations of MOSIP emerged as a prominent topic of discussion at MOSIP Connect 2026 in Rabat, Morocco. It was explicitly addressed in keynote speeches, discussed in panels, and brought up repeatedly in conversations in the halls of University Mohammed VI Polytechnic (UM6P) observed live on location by Biometric Update.

Uganda’s National Identification & Registration Authority (NIRA) has completed the first brownfield implementation of MOSIP, migrating more than 28 million records to its new identity platform, even as it added some 6.7 million new registrations.

Sierra Leone has been working on migrating its enrolled identity records to the MOSIP platform since successfully completing a pilot in early-2024. National Civil Registration Authority (NCRA) Deputy Director Moses T.F. Vibbie told Biometric Update in an interview last week that countries like his replacing an existing identity system must meet the expectations that have been set by the previous system. A gradual rollout or phased approach will not satisfy stakeholders who are already using the system for service delivery.

Nigeria is in the process of the largest brownfield MOSIP implementation yet, migrating the identity records of roughly 120 million people.

Uganda sets an example with migration under pressure

NIRA Executive Director Rosemary Kisembo credited Neurotechnology, which provided the country’s legacy ABIS, with making the migration easier than it might have been during a keynote on the morning of MOSIP Connect Day 1.

Uganda wanted to ensure that it could use the same biometrics and ID number to issue new IDs.

In that project, Kisembo says, the biggest problem the nation faced was vendors considering their product only up to the point of delivery. She defines successful delivery as meeting the goals of the country purchasing the technology.

Loading software from technoforte and Tech5 to the five thousand biometric kits in NIRA’s possession to make them compliant with MOSIP’s Secure Biometric Interface (SBI) protocol is an example of the steps necessary post-procurement.

Uganda’s system migration also provides a demonstration of how MOSIP can meet the requirements of a brownfield implementation through customization. The country issues two distinct ID cards – one for Ugandan citizens another for foreign nationals living in the country. This capability is not native to MOSIP, but was built into the system by NIRA to comply with Ugandan law.

Biometrics considerations

A session specifically on brownfield migration during the afternoon on Day 1 addressed the challenges of deduplicating multiple biometric databases, as is necessary when a migration is occurring while the legacy platform is still being used for service delivery. This was the case in Uganda.

The database was populated in a staging environment for initial enrollments, therefore, and only graduated to production once its records had been validated.

NIRA found about 200,000 duplicates during the process, Ugandan officials said during the session, over the course of about 7 months.

That time frame was truncated by the need to be ready for a national election, which forced NIRA to carry out new registrations while the migration was ongoing. Under pressure to complete the project quickly, NIRA accelerated from migrating around 8 thousand records per day during the first three months, with a goal by the end of the process of moving over 300,000 records each day.

The pressure was on: with the election looming Uganda ran out of its old ID cards last May. Kisembo says in one way the resulting urgency was “a blessing in disguise.”

Uganda had unencrypted images in its legacy database, which were checked for biometric data quality by the new vendor. Many were still useful, allowing NIRA to avoid recalling millions of Ugandans to re-enroll their biometrics.

Those needing to update their records for the new system performed biometric authentication, and additional manual verifications were established for people whose biometrics had not been captured in the legacy system, since they were children at the time of enrollment.

As the countries furthest behind in civil registration and digital identity catch up, these lessons for brownfield implementation will be increasingly important to MOSIP adoption.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  digital ID  |  MOSIP (Modular Open Source Identity Platform)  |  MOSIP Connect 2026  |  National Identification and Registration Authority of Uganda (NIRA)  |  Nigeria  |  Sierra Leone  |  Uganda