Kenya Attempts to Breathe New Life Into Digital ID Scheme

The Kenyan government is pushing for a nationwide digital ID scheme. But the years-long implementation so far has been beset with complications.

The government’s attempts to create a nationwide ID scheme go back years, following close to two decades of consolidating data from different population registration agencies.

A major milestone came in 2019 with the creation of the National Integrated Identity Management System (NIIMS), a national register which, in theory, assigns a unique and permanent identification number, known as a ‘Huduma Namba’, to each citizen in addition to an ID card.

Like the U.S. system of social security numbers, the idea is that the Huduma Namba assigned to Kenyan residents at birth or upon registration can be used to identify them in their various civil interactions, including those that occur online.

Yet several years into the project, the Huduma Namba has yet to be rolled out among the population at large.

Under the previous government, the scheme was bogged down by accusations that it was exclusionary and had inadequate privacy protections. At the same time, getting the requisite legislation through parliament also proved difficult.

However, since coming to power in September of last year, President William Ruto has attempted to reinvigorate efforts to launch a digital ID system as part of his government’s digitization agenda.

In comments made last week (Jan. 27), Ruto said he has asked the Ministry of Information, Communications and The Digital Economy (ICT) “to work on digital identity so that the big Huduma thing that never was — we can finally have as Kenyans a digital identity.”

He added that he had informed Eliud Owalo, Kenya’s cabinet secretary for the ICT, that “Kenyans must be able to identify themselves digitally” by the end of the year.

Ruto’s statement comes as the government is pushing to empower Kenyans to access a greater range of online services.

In those same remarks, the president said that the number of services available digitally has doubled from 300 to 600 in recent weeks and that the government is “well on course” to making it to 5,000 in the next six months.

Privacy Objections to Unique Personal Identifiers

What is uncertain from Ruto’s comments is whether the new proposal will retain the unique personal identification features of the beleaguered Huduma Namba system.

While taken for granted in the U.S., elsewhere, the concept of having a single lifelong identifier that can be used to track individuals across government databases has been fiercely resisted by privacy advocates.

For example, as EU policymakers move ahead with plans to launch their own bloc-wide digital identity framework, an initial proposal to include a “unique and persistent electronic identifier” has since been thrown into doubt.

In fact, given the difficulty in squaring such a proposal with laws in Germany and the Netherlands that prevent the government from tracking citizens using only a single identifier across databases, the European Commission (EC) appears to have backtracked on the idea.

“It is not necessary to have a single identifier and when identifiers are used, the strictest legal and technical safeguards must be applied,” a European Commission spokesperson said, according to a Euractiv report.

The issue is equally fraught in the U.K., which has a history of resistance to attempts to introduce mandatory ID card schemes. And while the government there is also exploring solutions that allow citizens to more easily identify themselves online, it has been striving to emphasize that such systems remain opt-in.

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