Digital ID
አንድ ሰው አንድ ነው!!
Ethiopia has accepted and endorsed the agenda for Sustainable Development with national commitments and ownership to implement the 2030 Agenda and its sustainable development goals (SDGs) include SDG 16.9 which calls for “legal identity for all, including birth registration by 2030.”
Unique identity will also facilitate Ethiopia’s participation in the African digital economy, which is expected to grow by over USD 300 Billion by 2025. Ethiopia has further recognized that Digital ID will contribute to the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
The lack of robust identification and poor Civil Registration and Vital Statistics system have contributed to the marginalization and exclusion of many. Legal identities can facilitate access to social and political services; promote financial and economic inclusion. The objective of the project office has been established to realize a robust, forward-looking, and digital ID system for the nation. The Ethiopian ID project has as its vision: “Build a foundational identity platform for Ethiopia, proving that an individual is who he/she claims to be, in a secure, electronic and sustainable way, to support all individual identity use cases for both citizens and legal residents of Ethiopia by 2025.”
The program has completed a laboratory-based pilot test of the ID platform called Fayda and is currently on its use case pilot rollout to enroll 100,000 residents by the end of June. Utilizing local capacity, NIDP has customized an open-source platform called MOSIP based on local context, and also drafted a legal proclamation that will soon be passed to the Council of Ministers. The Fayda Platform (id.gov.et/idservices) is a biometric-based Identification platform based on open standards to be customized by different countries and integrated with multiple other technologies including biometric device technologies and Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) solutions. This customized platform named “Fayda”, meaning “Value” in multiple Ethiopian Languages, is now under pilot implementation to explore strengths and improvement areas before the national rollout.
The pilot implementation so far (making around 25,000 registrations) exposed a host of technical and operational lessons that inform the planning and implementation of subsequent phases. Accordingly, field trials are planned as part of the pilot on selected use cases such as Industrial Park Development Corporation (IPDC),Productive Safety Net Programs (PSNP), Ministries, and Banks.
The main areas of focus for the pilot project include:
- Technology and platform testing
- Field implementation and enrollment
- Assessing key principles such as inclusion and data protection.
- Endorsing the draft ID proclamation, and
- Capacity and team building
Building on early insights from the first round of testing (lab-based and field-based soft pilots), the ongoing “Use-case based Pilot phase will deploy its technical and operational design to test further registration capabilities as well as authentication features with a series of partnering Ministries and other stakeholders.
