The House of Peoples’ Representatives has ratified the draft Digital Identity Proclamation with a view to establishing a uniform and reliable identity registration system which will be applied across the country. The proclamation was given a go ahead by the Council of Ministers and referred to the Parliament in August last year.

It is expected that the digital identification system would play a significant role in facilitating various Government and private services. The National ID Program, which aims at issuing Digital IDs to over 70 million citizens and residents of Ethiopia by the end of 2025, has already signed an agreement with the Ministry of Revenues (MoR) to link tax identification numbers (TIN) with national IDs. This is expected to enable the MoR to save the foreign exchange that it uses to purchase systems for the issuance of TIN.

The Digital ID program has launched a pilot test of the ID platform called Fayda and currently has registered 1.4 million residents. According to the program’s latest updates, the Digital ID pilot program is currently registering an average of 5,250 registrations per day.

Source: Fana BC, 2Merkato Archives, and National ID Program

Image source: Fana BC