More than 500 million Africans have no official identity document, which can severely limit their access to public, financial, and social services. Rwanda’s Irembo platform had processed more than 30 million cumulative service requests by 2025; Kenya saw the rollout of Huduma Cards canceled due to the absence of a data protection impact assessment. The UNDP documents both trajectories in its June 2026 report on public digital infrastructure in Africa and clarifies the conditions under which digital identity fulfills its promise of inclusion.

The essentials

  • More than 500 million Africans have no official identity document, according to the UNDP; this lack of official identification can exclude or hinder access to public services, credit, and social transfers.
  • None of the 55 member states of the African Union possesses all three components of digital infrastructure—identity, payments, data exchange—fully operational simultaneously.
  • By 2025, Irembo had processed more than 30 million service requests; Kenya’s Huduma Namba platform was suspended by the courts due to gaps in personal data protection.
  • A shared digital identity organizes a form of collective trust between citizens, administrations, and economic actors: when its rules remain opaque, this trust turns into a risk of exclusion or control.
  • The Digital Protocol of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), adopted in 2025, creates a regional framework, but its actual deployment depends on governance choices that each state must still make.

The 500 million invisible: what an identity makes possible

The absence of official identity is not a statistical footnote. Verifiable identity frequently conditions access to numerous public and private services. Without a recognized document, a farmer cannot open a mobile money account, a mother cannot register her child’s birth in a system linked to social benefits, a migrant worker cannot receive a wire transfer. The UNDP estimates that more than 500 million Africans lack a verifiable digital identity.

The gap is not uniform. It affects women, rural populations, and nomadic communities disproportionately. In several sub-Saharan African countries, rural civil registration remains very low, particularly for populations farthest from state services. Digital identity is therefore not a technical issue: it is an issue of political recognition. Being registered in a system is how you exist for the administration.

Recent work by Steven Pinker on “common knowledge” illuminates this mechanism. Institutions, money, law, and rights function because everyone knows that everyone else recognizes them. A shared digital identity creates exactly this type of collective convention: the citizen knows that the administration recognizes him, the administration knows it can issue him a right, the merchant knows he can trust him for payment. A solid and transparent convention liberates; an opaque or contested convention breeds distrust and exclusion.

The Rwanda model: what 30 million requests prove

Rwanda has built its public digital infrastructure by linking numerous services to identification, while its new national digital identity is being deployed. The Irembo platform, launched in the 2010s and progressively scaled up, now makes it possible to request a birth certificate, renew a driver’s license, pay property tax, or access social benefits from a phone without traveling. By 2025, Irembo had processed more than 30 million service requests.

This figure reflects something more than technical performance: millions of people judged the system reliable enough to use. Trust was built through evidence—requests were processed, deadlines were met, remedies existed. Rwanda also deployed community agents, human intermediaries who support people least comfortable with digital tools. The system thus reshaped the relationship between the state and its citizens, rather than simply replacing a screen for a counter.

Several conditions made this outcome possible. Stable political will across multiple administrations. A legal framework on data protection adopted in October 2021, after large-scale Irembo deployment. The publicly described architecture rests on a central national registry with authority, complemented by interoperability and data protection mechanisms. The model remains improvable, Rwanda is not a consolidated liberal democracy, and the questions of institutional governance that any centralized identification system raises deserve to be asked, but it demonstrates that large-scale deployment is technically feasible on the continent.

The Huduma Namba affair: when opacity reaches the courts

Kenya followed an inverse trajectory. In 2019, the government launched NIIMS, a digital identity system based on Huduma Namba, the unique identification number assigned to each enrolled person, whose legal instrument also contemplated DNA, but the government maintained before the Court that DNA was not collected during NIIMS enrollment. The ambition is similar to Rwanda’s: rationalize access to services, reduce fraud, create a single identity. But the method differs on one decisive point: the Court found sufficient public participation while requiring a regulatory framework compliant with implementation of NIIMS.

On January 30, 2020, Kenya’s High Court suspended implementation of NIIMS/Huduma Namba until adoption of a regulatory framework compliant with the Constitution. It found the absence of an impact analysis required by data protection law and noted insufficient regulatory safeguards. It notably required a regulatory framework addressing enrollment exclusion risk and annulled DNA collection for non-compliance with legal authority.

The Kenya outcome illustrates precisely what Pinker calls the collapse of common knowledge. When citizens don’t know what the state does with their data, they cannot validate the convention that gives digital identity its legitimacy. Distrust sets in. Legal remedies replace social trust. And the system, instead of including, excludes—first minorities and marginalized populations, who always fear a state registry.

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, in their work on institutions and the capture of technological gains, show that a technology deployed without countervailing power reinforces those who control it rather than redistributing its benefits. The courts required a complete regulatory framework, notably against exclusion risks and for data protection, before NIIMS could proceed. The technical infrastructure was in place; governance was not.

The three missing bricks: why no African state has all three

The UNDP’s June 2026 report documents a finding that the Rwanda-Kenya comparison had foreshadowed: several African Union member states do not simultaneously possess the three components of a fully operational public digital infrastructure: an identity system, interoperable payment infrastructure, and a secure data exchange mechanism between administrations.

Progress is real but fragmented. An increasing number of countries have deployed functional digital identity systems. A significant number have large-scale mobile payment platforms; Africa is globally ahead on this, with countries like Tanzania, Ghana, and Senegal where a majority of the adult population uses mobile money. But the three components rarely connect to each other. A citizen can have a digital identity and be unable to use it to receive a social benefit because the state’s payment system doesn’t recognize the identity format of its interior ministry.

This fragmentation has a political cause as much as a technical one: the three infrastructures were often deployed by different ministries, with different funders, according to different standards. Interoperability requires coordination that few governments have managed to impose. The result is an archipelago of systems that each function in their own perimeter and leave millions of people in the gaps—too digitized to benefit from paper systems, not digital enough to access digital services.

The AfCFTA Digital Protocol: contributions and unsettled questions

The African Union adopted the Protocol on Digital Trade in February 2024 and its eight annexes in February 2025 within the African Continental Free Trade Area framework. This text establishes common principles on digital identity interoperability, personal data protection, and trust in cross-border transactions, but it does not constitute the first African standard on these subjects. It is a strong political signal: the continent officially recognizes that public digital infrastructure is a common good, not one service market among others.

But the Protocol is a framework, not a deployment. Its principles must be transposed into national legislation, then into technical systems, then into administrative practices. Each step offers an opportunity to dilute, circumvent, or delay. The history of African regional protocols, in telecommunications, payments, freedom of movement, teaches that the distance between adoption and actual implementation can be long. The question of states’ capacity to honor their institutional commitments remains open.

The Protocol notably provides for a future annex on digital identities, with interoperability and data protection principles, as well as obligations to publish information on digital trade measures and encourages, to the extent possible, publication of government information in reusable formats. If applied, this clause improves transparency and can found disputes between states parties, without itself creating a citizen right of recourse comparable to the judicial review sought in the Huduma Namba case. This is the difference between a convention that everyone knows everyone must respect, and a system whose rules remain in a ministry’s filing cabinets.

The 2026-2035 choices: three trajectories, one common tipping point

Public digital infrastructure has a particular property: it is difficult to alter once deployed. Identity databases, exchange protocols, payment architectures create technical and political dependencies that last decades. The choices made between 2026 and 2035 will shape the contours of the African state for a generation.

Three trajectories seem to be emerging, though none yet dominates. The first is that of the generalized Rwanda model: a strong central state, unified infrastructure, measurable results but governance resting largely on trust granted to the executive. This model works when institutions are stable and honest; it becomes a tool of control when they are not. The second trajectory is that of durable fragmentation: sectoral systems that coexist without articulating, part of the population included in one perimeter and excluded from another, coordination costs that slow private investment and discourage reforms. The third, still embryonic, is that of a federated and interoperable architecture: common standards negotiated at the regional level, data remaining under citizen or community control, independent recourse mechanisms.

This is the most politically demanding; it is also what the AfCFTA Protocol seeks, at least in its text, to promote.

The relevant indicator is not the number of countries adopting a digital identity—this number will probably grow in most scenarios. The indicator concerns the formal presence of legal frameworks, oversight bodies, or recourse mechanisms, without necessarily measuring their independence, accessibility, or effectiveness for marginalized populations. Several African countries meet all three criteria simultaneously. A doubling of this number by 2030 could increase inclusion potential; if it stagnates, digital infrastructure risks reproducing, in digital form, the asymmetries of the paper administrations it was meant to replace.

Africa is already digitizing, at great speed, driven by young demographics and a mobile penetration rate among the most dynamic in the world. The question posed to its leaders is whether this digitization will produce an infrastructure of rights or an infrastructure of control. This distinction hinges on a few governance choices, laws, institutions, procedures. These are political decisions, not technical inevitabilities.

And some African states are concretely demonstrating that they can be made in the right direction. It is from these experiences that others can learn, provided they look not only at results but at the institutional conditions that made them possible.

Sources

  1. UNDP Africa, Digital Public Infrastructure in Africa, Executive Summary, June 2026. https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/2026-06/undp-africa-dpi-report-executive_summary-v2.1_0.pdf
  2. Steven Pinker, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. https://stevenpinker.com/publications/books
  3. Kenya High Court, Huduma Namba ruling, 2021 (Petition No. 56 of 2019, Nubian Rights Forum & Others v. Attorney General & Others).
  4. African Union, Digital Trade Protocol of the AfCFTA, 2025.
  5. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, PublicAffairs, 2023.