Digital Public Infrastructure Across Africa: A National Identity Systems Perspective

A rising global politics advocates to modernize national identity systems and link them with payment systems through digital technology by investing in digital public infrastructure (DPI). The DPI paradigm combines three core elements – digital legal identity systems, national payment systems, and safe and secure data exchange. This paper adopts the perspective of the national identity systems and legal identity literatures to begin to assess DPI initiatives across Africa as well as globally. Based on the three core functions of identity systems as well as their linkage to national payments systems, the paper conceptualizes four ideal-types of African national digital identity systems: identification-led, authentication-led, plural-ID, and payments-led. The paper contributes to global DPI debates by emphasizing the authentication function, by problematizing the relationship between national identity and payment systems and by interrogating a proposed set of global DPI indicators. A qualitative survey of eleven African states selected by means of this set of indicators finds empirical support for the utility of the typology in investigating how identity systems are changing across Africa and the world and how value can best be furthered in DPI investments.