Digital ID
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) that includes SDG 16.9 that 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 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 has contributed to 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.
This current “Use-case Pilot” targets to enroll 100,000 residents within certain sectoral service providers and conduct at least 5,000 authentications. Overall, this pilot includes registration/enrollment, ID and credentials generation as well as online and offline verification/authentication. After the current phase that is expected to be completed in the current fiscal year, a pre-launch phase is in the pipeline for another 500,000 enrollments as its target. This trend is expected to increase exponentially until the end of 2025.
Major Phases |
Timeline |
Target Population Reached |
Laboratory-based Pilot |
June 2020 – May 2021 |
200 |
Field-based Soft Pilot |
June – Nov 2021 |
5 thousand |
Use-case Pilot (Ongoing) |
Nov 2021 – June 2022 |
100 thousand |
Pre-launch Pilot |
July – Dec 2022 |
500 thousand |
Country Roll-out |
Jan 2023 – Dec 2025 |
70 million |

Vision
To Build a Sustainable Digital ID supporting all use cases for all Citizens and Residents by 2025

Mission
-
Building, maintaining and preserving civil data
-
Providing efficient and transparent service
-
Developing policy, procedure and systems for issuing, updating and authenticating unique national IDs
-
Ensuring availability, scalability and resilience of the technology infrastructure
-
Ensuring compliance

Principles
Inclusion :- “Leave no one behind”
Design :- “Dependable solution”
Governance :- “Oversight, Security, and Accountability”

Motto
አንድ ሰው አንድ ነው!!
Approach
Our Approach to Security & Prevention

Contact Us
+251 913158368
General Wingate St., Next to Abrehot National Library, Arat Kilo, Third Floor of Hilcoe Building, Addis Ababa.
Monday-Friday: 8:30 am – 5:30 pm
Follow Us
on social media links