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.
In this first-ever book on biometric digital ID in Africa, nine open-access country case studies from across the continent explore who is driving the rapid pace of change, who benefits and who is disadvantaged.
As widespread adoption of digital-IDs expands across the world, concerns emerge regarding its implications for mass surveillance, human rights violations, state control, and political influence. While millions of African citizens benefit from the convenience of digitally verifying their entitlement to certain services, this ability is being distributed unevenly and comes at the cost of privacy and with the risk of data misuse. As governments make access to essential services including education, healthcare, voting, mobile phone and banking conditional on provision of personal and biometric data, millions are being excluded. Many rural, elderly, illiterate, disabled, and stateless people cannot enrol and are locked out of essential services and entitlements. The effects of these 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 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, United Kingdom *
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 *
Digital biometric identification systems are rapidly spreading across Africa, touted as modernisation and empowerment technologies. This brilliant contribution to critical data studies shows they are political surveillance apparatuses for incorporation, shaped by governmental and corporate authorities rather than citizens. Case studies reveal function creep, weak safeguards, exclusion, and neo-colonial continuity, demonstrating that these systems don’t simply recognise people; they reorganise the state-citizenship relationships. * Engin Isin, Professor Emeritus, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom *
ISBN: 9781350593886
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
336 pages