Running National ID as a Lifetime Service

The ID4Africa AGM 2026 (12-15 May) in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, set out to move the conversation from deploying digital public infrastructure to the work of running national ID as a full-life system.

Across plenaries and the Solutions Forum, the programme repeatedly returned to four concrete questions: how can you keep identity records accurate over decades, how can you secure the full issuance/verification chain, how can you make systems interoperable without breaking privacy law, and how do you pay for operations once the initial project phase ends?

Identity as a system

In his opening address, Executive Chairman Dr Joseph Atick framed Africa’s identity journey as a progression from mass enrolment to identity as digital public infrastructure, and now to digital public ecosystems. He argued that infrastructure must endure and be funded accordingly, making sustainability a central requirement driven by ‘real economic and social activity’. That activity depends on relying parties using identities, which raises the need for safeguards and oversight by data protection authorities and civil society organisations.