Ethiopia moves to expand Fayda enrollment with $54M Super Agent procurement

Ethiopia’s Digital ID for Inclusion and Services Project is in urgent need of “Super Agents” to facilitate large-scale registration and help the project reach people who are currently underserved.

The push reflects broader efforts by Ethiopia to scale Fayda from a foundational identity system into national digital public infrastructure supporting service delivery, inclusion and authentication across sectors.

This is one of the recommendations of a report after an evaluation mission conducted by World Bank in March.

In its second year, the project has surpassed 39 million Fayda enrollments, integrated more than 100 public and private institutions and recorded over 78 million authentications. The total project financing is $350 million.

While the issuance of digital IDs is progressing with more than nine million cards delivered so far, the project has also successfully integrated over 100 public and private institutions, and more than 78 million authentications recorded.

A joint task force has also supported approximately 190,000 refugee registrations and 170,000 ID issuances alongside more than 200,000 host community registrations.

The ID project has also made some gains in strengthening cybersecurity infrastructure, with the ongoing development of an Information Security Management System (ISMS) to achieve ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification, with the process expected to be initiated in July.

Despite the progress, the evaluation mission said procurement, operational and implementation bottlenecks still threaten enrollment targets.

One of the urgent actions is to speed up registration, especially in hard-to-reach communities, notably as the project has a target of reaching 60 million enrollments by June, and 90 million by September.

To get this done, some Super Agents will have to be recruited. The Super Agents would function as front-end enrollment partners, deploying staff and infrastructure to underserved and hard-to-reach communities.

The $54 million procurement has completed evaluation and is awaiting World Bank clearance before contract awards can proceed.

General procurement regarding the project is rated “satisfactory” but there was a recommendation for more action over the next six months, especially for the 43 planned activities for which procurement has not yet started.

Other recommendations include the recruitment of a contract manager, clearance of delays in performance guarantees for signed IT infrastructure contracts, and addressing minor inconsistencies between the Project Implementation Unit’s internal reporting and World Bank STEP data,

The report also calls for accelerated deployment of “FaydaVerse,” the business layer of the national ID program, deeper integration of ID services across government systems and continued development of Ethiopia’s broader digital public infrastructure roadmap.

Article Topics

biometric enrollment  |  digital ID infrastructure  |  Ethiopia  |  Fayda  |  national ID  |  procurement  |  World Bank