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ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services
Ecosystem

relevant national identity programs in the 43 countries. For each national ID program, we reviewed the evidence
using a framework that contains the following information:

• Basic national identity program information – includes information about the management, funding,
target population, and general history of the program.

• National identity program methodology – includes information on enrollment/registration methods,
credentials used (e.g., biometrics), and general operation of the program.
• Implementation of the program – includes information on coverage/inclusion of the program, cost of
the program, and implementation challenges.
• Functional applications of the program – includes information on uses of the program for health, finance,
agriculture, elections, social transfers, civil service administration, surveillance and security, and other
purposes.
The complete set of review framework questions is included in Appendix B. In this report, we use information
coded according to our framework to summarize trends and gaps among national identity programs. The
complete spreadsheet is included along with this report and provides additional detail for all of the national
identity programs reviewed.

3 Overview of Selected National Identity Programs

We reviewed literature for a total of 48 national identity programs or initiatives in the 43 countries of interest.
These national identity programs or initiatives include 38 government-issued national identity card programs,
two passport programs, four voter’s card programs, as well as three special identity programs (Figure 1). A
summary table of the 48 selected national identity programs, which presents the country, program name,
program type, enrollment approach, year of launch, and implementation status of each program, is included
in Appendix C.

Figure 1 – Type of National Identity Program

For most countries, a government-issued national identity card is the main program that is being used for both
identification verification and for at least one functional authentication purpose. In five of the countries we
review, including Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Nigeria, Ukraine, and Zambia, there is more than one prominent
national identity program. In addition to their national identity card programs, Burkina Faso and Zambia also
implemented voter’s card programs. Burkina Faso had been using their national identity cards as primary
documents for registration of voters (The Carter Center, 2013). In 2012, the Burkinabè government began to
roll out a biometric voter card program to prevent duplicate voting registrations due to the lack of a reliable

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