Liberia advances PPP-backed digital ID rollout with OSD

Liberia is moving ahead with the public-private partnership outlined by National Identification Registry (NIR) Executive Director Andrew Peters in an exclusive interview with Biometric Update earlier this year, completing consultations on the proposed concession agreement with the Austrian State Printing House (OSD) as it prepares for a nationwide biometric enrollment campaign.

In May, Peters told Biometric Update that President Joseph Boakai had rejected a traditional procurement model in favor of a concession arrangement under which OSD would finance nationwide enrollment and identity card issuance, recover its investment over time and ultimately transfer the system to the government.

The New Dawn Liberia now reports that consultations on the proposed concession agreement have concluded and the draft is headed to Parliament for approval, clearing the next step toward nationwide enrollment.

National ID issuance has been suspended in Liberia since last year after the government halted  the exercise to address a litany of challenges that were plaguing the process, including concerns over lack of procurement transparency.

The NIR has since been engaging with important community stakeholders in some parts of the country to set the tone for the launch of a biometric enrolment drive for the country’s new national ID system.

The new system is intended to expand national ID coverage and increase its adoption and use for access to a wide range of government and private sector services. The NIR says it will disclose details of the PPP agreement once the legislative approval process has been completed.

Liberia currently has a very low national ID coverage at less than 15 percent of the country’s population of more than five million people. In the new dispensation, officials say they intend to make ID card issuance free for poor first-time applicants.

Settling for the PPP model also shows the increasing shift by nations to more pragmatic and sustainable approaches to building digital public infrastructure (DPI). Through it, Liberia says it also seeks to strengthen its guardianship over personal data management as part of efforts to advance digital sovereignty, which is now a priority for almost every country building DPI.

Article Topics

Austrian State Printing House (OSD)  |  biometric enrollment  |  Liberia  |  national ID  |  National Identification Registry (NIR)  |  public-private partnerships