An estimated 542 million Africans lack identity cards and potentially face statelessness. Without a legal identity, they can be excluded from basic human rights like education, healthcare and protection.
Most African countries have tried to rectify this by adopting a digital identity system to provide “legal identity for all, including birth registration” according to the Sustainable Development Goal 16.9 by 2030. Digital identity systems use databases to store biometrics and personal identity information together.
These systems claim to abolish identity fraud and corruption, because the identity is permanently fixed in the database and cannot easily be tampered with. In practice, however, creating and maintaining the system relies on many intermediaries. Chiefs, legal personnel, local authorities, teachers, employers, document brokers, family and friends all participate in enrolling, updating and certifying identities. These intermediaries make the system vulnerable to manipulation. But without them, hardly a legal identity could be established.
Within a transnational research project on digital identification, I have done ethnographic research with some of these intermediaries in Sierra Leone. I argue that they act as “brokers of citizenship”. They support people in becoming citizens by establishing an understanding of who is a citizen and what it means to be a citizen in terms of rights and duties.
In Sierra Leone, they have helped more than six million undocumented citizens to be included in the digital civil register and obtain a legal identity. My research in Sierra Leone illustrates that intermediaries have a crucial role in achieving the goal of citizenship for all.
Leave no one behind
Digital identity projects pursue the “one person, one identity” rule. They promise to create a permanent, secure and unique official identity for everyone based on linking a person’s biometrics to a permanent digital government database. Secure ID cards or birth certificates are then delivered based on these data entries.
But the process to obtain this official identity is a challenge for many people in Africa and more broadly the global south. People without sufficient recognised documents like birth certificates have difficulties in proving their identity. Minority ethnic groups, migrants, refugees and borderland communities struggle to prove their citizenship. Those excluded from citizen documents thus risk further exclusion from getting the new digital identities.
ID services are often distant and expensive. In rural populations especially, there is a need to travel far to registration centres. Rolling out digital identification to people in remote areas needs equipment, electricity, connectivity and tech-savvy staff. In Sierra Leone, the new digital ID card for citizens costs 165 Leones (about US$8). It is seven times more expensive than the old paper card.
Despite the promise of the Sustainable Development Goals to “Leave No One Behind” and provide digital identity for everyone, many Africans indeed risk being left out. Intermediaries are crucial for remedying these gaps.
Making identities official
Sierra Leoneans without sufficient documents to register for a digital identity can approach a “justice of the peace”. These usually retired men and a few women are appointed by the government to document oaths. Citizens can swear an oath about their identity to this official or his or her clerks. Against a small informal fee paid by the client, they document the claims about their name, date and place of birth on a form, a so-called “affidavit”. My research shows that this renders the identity claim of the client official.
Citizens can then use these affidavits to get biometrically enrolled at the responsible state office, the National Civil Registration Authority. Officials at the state office told me they widely trusted the declared information: “What you put on it is what we now believe in.” They appreciated this work of the justice of the peace, because otherwise undocumented people would be “disenfranchised” and risk becoming stateless.
As a colonial legacy, justices of the peace exist in many countries worldwide. There’s a risk they can exclude people based on discriminatory understandings of citizenship drawing on race, ethnicity or indigeneity for determining belonging. But they have played a crucial role in the inclusion of underdocumented people as citizens in digital identity projects.
Bridging the state and marginalised citizens
Justices of the peace do not only formalise identities. They are a bridge between the administration and marginalised citizens.
The Sierra Leonean justices of the peace are selected by the president of the republic for their good character and authority in their community as long-term civil servants, pastors, imams or chiefs. They hold a lot of authority and knowledge on the state and the administration.
In contrast to their status, many of them operate from a small table right in the bustle of urban informality. This is crucial for being accessible to marginalised citizens who might be fearful of contact with the administration. They might know little about its workings and experience civil servants as condescending or even authoritarian. They share information with citizens on how the administration works and give them advice on how they should act when they want to get the ID card.
Inclusivity needs intermediaries
In contrast to their promise, digital identities do not abolish intermediaries. Instead, they rely on the intermediaries’ work for identifying people and orienting them in the process. In addition to the justices of the peace, many other relatives, chiefs and state officials get involved in people’s identification. Although their involvement may make the system vulnerable to manipulation, intermediaries will remain important in the years ahead to remedy the civil registration gaps in Africa.
The work of these intermediaries has far-reaching consequences for achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 16.9 and for bringing citizenship into being.
Laura Lambert receives funding from HORIZON EUROPE European Research Council (101039758).
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
