A major new study covering ten African countries has found that biometric digital ID systems costing more than $1 billion to install across the continent are locking millions of citizens out of voting, healthcare, education and social protection payments, while operating without adequate legal protections, independent oversight or meaningful accountability when systems fail.
The report, published by the African Digital Rights Network through the Institute of Development Studies and coordinated with 75 digital rights researchers from 30 African countries, documents a widening exclusion crisis. People with disabilities, those without phones, those who cannot afford mobile data or electricity and those in rural areas cannot enrol, which means they lose access to the state services they are legally entitled to receive. The scale of rollout has been rapid: Ghana registered 19 million people, around 95% of its adult population, to the GhanaCard system between 2017 and 2025. Ethiopia has enrolled 28 million people, around 35% of its population, in the Fayda-ID scheme. In Senegal, an estimated 10% of citizens over 15, more than one million people, still lack a biometric ID and therefore lack access to phone numbers, bank accounts, electricity and water. Only two of the ten countries studied conducted any risk assessment before launching their systems, and neither included safeguards for all affected groups. Most systems also lack accountability mechanisms to correct errors or provide redress when data breaches occur. Researchers documented confirmed cases of personal data being used to surveil government critics and opposition figures in multiple countries, and flagged data sharing with private companies and international agencies in Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt and Senegal. In Egypt, the collection of religious affiliation data heightens discrimination risk in the event of a breach. World Bank loans for just two countries, Ethiopia and Nigeria, total $780 million of the continent-wide $1 billion-plus bill, raising questions about whose interests are being served when systems citizens did not ask for are imposed top-down.
The pattern across the ten countries is consistent: legal frameworks have not kept pace with deployments, enforcement where laws exist is minimal and independent regulators lack the resources or mandate to act. Only a handful of countries, including Kenya and Ethiopia, drafted dedicated digital ID policy documents before launching. Kenya’s own rollout has been paused three times by courts after the government skipped a data protection impact assessment and failed to resolve the prior double-registration of thousands of citizens.
The Bigger Picture Biometric digital ID is being presented across Africa as a neutral modernisation tool, but this research confirms it is a political one. Forty-nine of Africa’s 54 countries now operate at least one biometric system, most supplied by a small number of predominantly European vendors, creating structural dependencies that sit largely outside public scrutiny. The $1 billion-plus price tag for systems citizens did not request, funded heavily by international lenders with their own incentives, is being passed on through national budgets while the governance frameworks that would make those systems safe and inclusive remain unbuilt. The promise of digital ID is real: it can reduce fraud, extend financial inclusion and reach citizens paper systems miss. But that promise is being squandered by speed without safeguards, and the people paying the highest price are those who were already most excluded.
