Publication:
The State of Identification Systems in Africa: A Synthesis of Country Assessments

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Files in English
English PDF (7.43 MB)
7,295 downloads
English Text (266.49 KB)
86 downloads
Published
2017-04
ISSN
Date
2017-05-04
Editor(s)
Abstract
The ability to prove one's identity is a cornerstone of participation in modern life, yet over 1.5 billion people lack proof of legal identity. As a first step in assisting its client countries to close this identity gap, the World Bank Group's ID4D initiative conducts Identity Management Systems Analyses (IMSAs) to evaluate countries' identity ecosystems and facilitate collaboration with governments for future work. To date, analyses have been conducted in 17 African countries, including Botswana, Chad, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Guinea, Lenya, Liberia, Madagascar, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Zambia.
Link to Data Set
Citation
World Bank Group. 2017. The State of Identification Systems in Africa: A Synthesis of Country Assessments. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/26504 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Report Series
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Publication
    Digital Identity Toolkit : A Guide for Stakeholders in Africa
    (Washington, DC, 2014-06) World Bank Group
    Digital identity, or electronic identity (eID), offers developing nations a unique opportunity to accelerate the pace of their national progress. It changes the way services are delivered, helps grow a country's digital economy, and supports effective safety nets for disadvantaged and impoverished populations. Though digital identity is an opportunity, it raises important considerations with respect to privacy, cost, capacity, and long-term viability. This report provides a strategic view of the role of identification in a country's national development, as well as a tactical view of the building blocks and policy choices needed for setting up eID in a developing country. The report presents a conceptual overview of digital identity management practices, providing a set of guidelines at a national level that policymakers can find helpful as they begin to think about modernizing the identity infrastructure of their country into eID. The report also provides an operating knowledge of the terminology and concepts used in identity management and an exposition of the functional blocks that must be in place. Policy considerations are referenced at the end of the report that governments can use as they contemplate a digital identity program. Given its abridged nature, the report is intended to be insightful and detailed, though not exhaustive. Several important topics related to eID are noted though deserve further discussion, including: economic and financial analysis, the development and setup of a national civil register, and cross-border aspects of eID. The building blocks, as discussed, can help ensure that a secure, robust and reliable digital identity platform can serve the development needs of a country for the foreseeable future.
  • Publication
    Understanding Cost Drivers of Identification Systems
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-12-13) World Bank
    Approximately one billion people globally lack government-recognized identification. As a consequence, they face barriers to accessing critical services and exercising their rights. Robust, inclusive, and responsible foundational identification (ID) systems2 can be transformative for a country’s development and for the welfare of its poorest and most vulnerable populations by enabling financial inclusion, the empowerment of women and girls, access to basic services, social safety nets, and political participation. Moreover, at a systemic level, leapfrogging traditional paper-based approaches in favor of digital identification systems can generate significant benefits across the public and private sectors by increasing efficiency and accountability (chiefly through the reduction of fraud, leakages, and waste in public programs) as well as driving innovation in service delivery (through the use of mobile or digital payments, for instance). As governments across the globe are implementing new, digital foundational identification systems or modernizing existing ID programs, there is an urgent need to develop accurate estimations of the associated costs. There are a handful of existing analyses that have attempted to estimate the overall cost of foundational ID systems: for instance, Gelb and Diofasi Metz (2018) estimate that it is likely to cost a low income country roughly 0.6 percent of GDP to build a foundational ID system, or about $4–11 investment per registrant for enrolment and credential issuance. The same study cites figures for a few countries suggesting recurrent costs of around 0.06–0.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). As the authors point out however, few data points exist and these figures may not apply to different types of systems or to all countries.
  • Publication
    Identification for Development
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-06) Atick, Joseph J; Palacios, Robert J.; Ouerghi, Azedine
    The report is organized into the following sections: section two presents the approach and methodology of the evaluation used. It gives an overview of the Identification Systems Analysis (ISA). Section three gives a detailed description of the Identity ecosystem in Cote d’Ivoire. It examines all the identification schemes that were considered of primary importance by the Mission and that were part of the interviews conducted. Where enough data was collected, the ISA analysis is performed and the color coded score is presented. Section four presents a series of recommendations to address the identification needs of the WB Project but also for improving the identification practices in the country in general. Those recommendations are based on the extensive experience that the World Bank ISA team has had in the course of applying the tool in similar environments. In addition to these primary sections, the report contains four appendices: appendix one presents the scoring methodology of ISA. Appendix two provides a brief history of identification regulations in Côte d’Ivoire. It is meant to give some legal context to the identification schemes currently in place. Appendix three discusses how the foundation of current identity schemes (national identity card and the voter register) were dictated by the Peace Accord of Ouagadougou, and what role identity played in the conflict and the exit from that period. Appendix four is a detailed overview of the important law on privacy. The so called Law No. 2013-450 related to the protection of personally identifying information, which was adopted in 2013 and is currently being enforced systematically. This is the Côte d’Ivoire adaptation of the ECOWAS law on data protection and it represents a very significant body of codified legislation.
  • Publication
    Reforming Business Registration : A Toolkit for the Practitioners
    (Washington, DC, 2013-01) International Finance Corporation; World Bank
    The private sector, through investment and job creation, plays a crucial role in a country's fight against poverty. Where an effective private sector is lacking, business registration reform has been shown to be one of the essential first steps toward fostering private-sector growth. The easier, faster, and cheaper the business registration process becomes, the higher the number of businesses in an economy. A number of recent studies have found that simpler registration processes translate into advantages for workers and employers, including greater employment opportunities, more productive jobs, and higher total factor productivity. In addition, society as a whole benefits from registration reform. Business registration reform also has the potential to reduce both informality and gender disparity in entrepreneurship. This toolkit provides a systematic analysis of various reform options and is meant to serve as a guide for policy makers and practitioners implementing business registration reform. The toolkit thus displays the fundamentals of international good practice that can be adapted to specific country contexts in a coherent, consistent, and sustainable way.
  • Publication
    E-GP Functional Specifications
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-04) Asian Development Bank; Inter-American Development Bank; World Bank
    Authorities in developed and newly developing countries alike have been seeking to reform and strengthen the governance and management frameworks around their systems of public procurement. Their objectives have been to enhance effective management, reduce the risk of corruption, promote economic activity, and strengthen policy and strategic development. Increasingly an important part of these reforms has become the systematic application of technology to the processes of public procurement, including in the advertising of business opportunities, management of information and workflows, document delivery, purchase orders and transactions. This systematic application of technology to government procurement, or e-Government Procurement (e-GP), can lead to a substantial automation of the procurement process but requires significant reforms and process improvements in the management of procurement. These reforms have seen the introduction of new procurement laws and regulations, the introduction of new training for public procurement officers, changes in management procedures including standardization and simplification, and enhanced competition for government procurement opportunities. However one key issue deserves further attention namely defining the functional specifications of the e-GP system that is to be acquired or built, this is the subject of this paper. This paper seeks to give guidance on what functions and qualities they could seek from their e-GP system, or if they are engaging a third party provider then this may also give guidance on what capabilities they might require in their service level agreement

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

  • Publication
    Digital Africa
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13) Begazo, Tania; Dutz, Mark Andrew; Blimpo, Moussa
    All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.
  • Publication
    Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report 2024
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-15) World Bank
    The Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report 2024 is the latest edition of the series formerly known as Poverty and Shared Prosperity. The report emphasizes that reducing poverty and increasing shared prosperity must be achieved in ways that do not come at unacceptably high costs to the environment. The current “polycrisis”—where the multiple crises of slow economic growth, increased fragility, climate risks, and heightened uncertainty have come together at the same time—makes national development strategies and international cooperation difficult. Offering the first post-Coronavirus (COVID)-19 pandemic assessment of global progress on this interlinked agenda, the report finds that global poverty reduction has resumed but at a pace slower than before the COVID-19 crisis. Nearly 700 million people worldwide live in extreme poverty with less than US$2.15 per person per day. Progress has essentially plateaued amid lower economic growth and the impacts of COVID-19 and other crises. Today, extreme poverty is concentrated mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa and fragile settings. At a higher standard more typical of upper-middle-income countries—US$6.85 per person per day—almost one-half of the world is living in poverty. The report also provides evidence that the number of countries that have high levels of income inequality has declined considerably during the past two decades, but the pace of improvements in shared prosperity has slowed, and that inequality remains high in Latin America and the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa. Worldwide, people’s incomes today would need to increase fivefold on average to reach a minimum prosperity threshold of US$25 per person per day. Where there has been progress in poverty reduction and shared prosperity, there is evidence of an increasing ability of countries to manage natural hazards, but climate risks are significantly higher in the poorest settings. Nearly one in five people globally is at risk of experiencing welfare losses due to an extreme weather event from which they will struggle to recover. The interconnected issues of climate change and poverty call for a united and inclusive effort from the global community. Development cooperation stakeholders—from governments, nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector to communities and citizens acting locally in every corner of the globe—hold pivotal roles in promoting fair and sustainable transitions. By emphasizing strategies that yield multiple benefits and diligently monitoring and addressing trade-offs, we can strive toward a future that is prosperous, equitable, and resilient.
  • Publication
    Protecting People and Economies
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-05) World Bank
    The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a global health emergency and an unprecedented economic crisis of historic magnitude. Governments facing this threat are in uncharted territory, but three policy priorities addressed in this note are clear. Disease containment is a first-order concern to combat the pandemic, and measures such as testing and tracing, coupled with isolating and treating the infected can bring first-order gains. The economic crisis requires a parallel and simultaneous effort to save jobs, protect income, and ensure access to services for vulnerable populations. As governments act to slow the pandemic and protect lives and livelihoods now, they will need to maintain macro stability, continue to build trust, and communicate clearly to avoid deeper downturns and social unrest. Looking forward, this crisis can be an opportunity to rethink policy to build back with stronger systems for people and economies.
  • Publication
    Global Economic Prospects, January 2025
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-16) World Bank
    Global growth is expected to hold steady at 2.7 percent in 2025-26. However, the global economy appears to be settling at a low growth rate that will be insufficient to foster sustained economic development—with the possibility of further headwinds from heightened policy uncertainty and adverse trade policy shifts, geopolitical tensions, persistent inflation, and climate-related natural disasters. Against this backdrop, emerging market and developing economies are set to enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century with per capita incomes on a trajectory that implies substantially slower catch-up toward advanced-economy living standards than they previously experienced. Without course corrections, most low-income countries are unlikely to graduate to middle-income status by the middle of the century. Policy action at both global and national levels is needed to foster a more favorable external environment, enhance macroeconomic stability, reduce structural constraints, address the effects of climate change, and thus accelerate long-term growth and development.
  • Publication
    Insurance Risk Transfer and Categorization of Reinsurance Contracts
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-12) Gurenko, Eugene N.; Itigin, Alexander; Wiechert, Renate
    Despite the existence of numerous quantitative approaches to the categorization of financial reinsurance contracts, often insurance regulators may find the practical implementation of the task to be technically challenging. This research paper develops a simple, affordable, and robust regulatory method that can help insurance regulators to categorize financial reinsurance contracts as reinsurance or financial instruments. By reviewing real examples of different categorization methods, this paper explains how the proposed method standardizes such categorization. It also summarizes the existing pertinent literature on the subject with the view to helping insurance regulators to first apply some simple indicators to flag the main issues with financial reinsurance contracts that may need further reviews. Having identified the suspicious reinsurance contracts, supervisors may consider several solutions provided by the authors and, in some cases, requiring further quantitative testing of risk transfer contracts for categorization purposes, supervisors may also consider adopting the Standardized Expected Reinsurer's Deficit approach to contract testing presented in this paper. The approach advocates the use of a simple standardized stochastic method that would allow market participants and regulators to perform robust quantitative tests quickly and at an affordable cost. Besides addressing the obvious drawbacks of the "10-10" test, the proposed alternative method allows a great reduction in the technical challenges posed to the users of the Expected Reinsurer's Deficit approach based on full stochastic models with only a minimum loss of predictive accuracy.