Somewhere in the annals of grand government plans lies a promise of a singular citizen identifier issued at birth that would unlock access to government services. PHOTO | FILE
The countdown to the next General Election has started in earnest and the conversations around our technology stack for the D-day must be viewed from an eternal lens and not focused just on the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission’s choices and deployment thereof.
The crux of the matter is the need to identify people on demand across multiple channels with high availability and reliability; not just for government purposes but to also power trade and commerce.
Somewhere in the annals of grand government plans lies a promise of a singular citizen identifier, issued at birth that would unlock access to government services and when opened up, would allow for addition of valuable metadata that one would have created through daily living.
Since we have 40 million plus people already identifying as Kenyans, this platform would have to be run in parallel with current systems until we mop up all data from the legacy platforms. The Integrated Population Registration System (IPRS), one of the flagship projects of the Jubilee government, had two phases to it; the first being the setting up of the National Population Register (NPR) and the second being the issuance of what I would call the “service pin”. IPRS works with a host of other government agencies — like the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, the National Registration Bureau, the Civil Registration Department, the Immigration Department, the Department of Refugees’ Affairs, National Hospital Insurance Fund, National Social Security Fund and Kenya Revenue Authority to ingest and sanitise data. Granted, we have made progress on some line items but two issues remain.
First is that we are still seemingly replicating effort by running fresh data drives every so often as opposed to scaling the system to negate the need to go back on the ground to recollect data from citizens and other persons of interest who had already been profiled.
Secondly, the data enrichment is poorly thought through, with just the government agencies and a few publics feeding the funnel.
The addition of metadata to the baseline from varied sources in real or near real-time will increase the value of the platform(s) by several factors while reducing the costs of running and maintenance.
Digital component
The National Public Key Infrastructure project, funded by the World Bank under the Kenya Transparency and Communications Infrastructure Project, would have provided an excellent starting point for the collection of additional metadata as many services touching millions daily have a digital component.
Throw in block chain on edge applications and you might just get the drift of it.
We need political goodwill plus lots of volunteer and possibly open source efforts from our technologically inclined minds to deliver on a set of POC’s that can showcase the value of identity as a service elegantly embedded into experiences and its positive effects on the issues that currently beleaguer us.
Njihia is CEO of Symbiotic | www.mbuguanjihia.com | @mbuguanjihia
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