Biometric Digital ID in Africa
Identification, Rights, and Power
Tony Roberts editor Gbenga Sesan editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:10th Dec '26
£65.00
This title is due to be published on 10th December, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Gathering nine country case studies from every region in Africa, this open access book explores who digital ID benefits and who it disadvantages.
Gathering eight country case studies from every region in Africa, this open access book explores who digital ID benefits and who it disadvantages.
Gathering nine country case studies from every region in Africa, this open access book explores who biometric digital-ID benefits and who it disadvantages.
As technological advancements lead to widespread adoption of digital-IDs across the world, concerns are emerging regarding their potential role in mass surveillance, human rights violations, state control,and political influence. While millions of African citizens benefit from the increased speed and convenience of being able to digitally verify their entitlement to certain services, many rural, elderly, illiterate, disabled, and stateless people are now unable to access the same services. The effects of digital identification systems on citizens rights and power relations in Africa are not well understood.
This book addresses that deficit. Each chapter is written by digital rights researchers or emerging African scholars, and offers in-depth examinations of these crucial issues through the real-life experiences of African citizens. Each chapter is situates the emergence of biometric digital-ID within that country's specific political and economic context, as well as its pre-digital forms of identification and governance.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Open Society Foundations.
This is the book on digital identity the field has been waiting for: an account of biometric ID in Africa written from within the continent by African researchers, tracing how these systems actually land in people's lives rather than how they are narrated by the governments, donors and technology vendors that build them. Rigorous, comparative and politically alert, it demonstrates that identification is never a neutral administrative technique but always a question of rights and power — and it deserves to be read by anyone working on digital ID anywhere. * Dr. Emre Eren Korkmaz, Lecturer and Research Affiliate, University of Oxford, Great Britain *
Asking the pertinent questions: if African citizens didn’t prioritize biometric digital ID, whose agenda is it? Where is the funding coming from, who benefits, who is being (dis)advantaged or excluded and which power interests does it serve? This book explores the roll out of biometric digital ID systems across nine African countries. It demonstrates that although these systems are often framed as techno-fixes to weak civil registries and fragmented credentials, they should never be treated as pathways to universal social and economic inclusion. * Admire Mare, Professor, University of Johannesburg, South Africa *
ISBN: 9781350593886
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
256 pages