Biometric Digital ID in Africa

In this first-ever book on biometric digital ID in Africa, nine open-access country case studies from across the continent explore who is driving the rapid pace of change, who benefits and who is disadvantaged.As widespread adoption of digital-IDs expands across the world, concerns emerge regarding its implications for mass surveillance, human rights violations, state control, and political influence. While millions of African citizens benefit from the convenience of digitally verifying their entitlement to certain services, this ability is being distributed unevenly and comes at the cost of privacy and with the risk of data misuse. As governments make access to essential services including education, healthcare, voting, mobile phone and banking conditional on provision of personal and biometric data, millions are being excluded. Many rural, elderly, illiterate, disabled, and stateless people cannot enrol and are locked out of essential services and entitlements. The effects of these digital identification systems on citizens’ rights and power relations in Africa are not well understood.This book addresses that deficit. Each chapter is written by digital rights researchers or emerging African scholars and offers in-depth examinations of these crucial issues through the real-life experiences of African citizens. Each chapter situates the emergence of biometric digital-ID within that country’s specific political and economic context, as well as its pre-digital forms of identification and governance.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Open Society Foundations.