Page 106 - The Digital Financial Services (DFS) Ecosystem

ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services
Ecosystem

Uganda have made this a function of their upcoming national ID registries, and Tanzania is developing a system
with links to civil service employees. India has already implemented such a system:

“The Indian government has launched a Biometric Attendance System (BAS) using the Aadhaar number
provided through the UIDAI. So far some 50,000 central government employees have been registered across
148 organizations in Delhi. Employees are registered using their Aadhaar numbers and log in and out daily. Their
attendance rates can be tracked on a dashboard, aggregated across organizations and accessed by anyone on
the BAS public domain: Attendance.gov.in. […] One can access the website without any login constraint, search
employees by name, find out whether they were at work that day, what time they arrived and left, and how
many work days, sick days and vacation days they have taken in the past month” (Raghavan & Gelb, 2014, p. 1).

Tracking of attendance also has applicatons for education. In Ghana, children are issued personal identification
numbers at age six. These numbers are used at every stage of enrollment from primary school to college.
Centralized data on school attendance allows the government to allocate resources, build infrastructure, and
develop policy interventions (National Identification Authority, 2015).
Another theme that emerged in the literature is national IDs as a document to facilitate travel within countries.
Documentation can help guarantee freedom of movement (Cote D’Ivoire) or be used by railways to book
travel (India). In addition, as described in the section on surveillance and security, the national IDs of several
countries can be used as regional passports.

Key Findings

• We do not find any association between region and number of functional linkages, although national ID
programs in South Asia have the highest mean number of connections to different types of functions,
driven by well-integrated programs in India and Pakistan.
• The year a program is introduced is not associated with the number of functional linkages, but programs
that are still actively enrolling members appear to be linked to more types of services.
• Programs that incorporate cards with electronic components or biometrics have a higher mean number
of different linkages than programs that do not.
• In most regions, over half of national identity programs have or plan financial linkages.
• Programs in South and Southeast Asia appear most likely to have health linkages, with over 40 percent
of programs connected to a health function.
• National identity programs in Sub-Saharan Africa are more likely to be linked to financial services (62
percent) than health services (19 percent).

6 Characteristics of ID Programs with Functional Applications

In this section we consider whether any ID program characteristics, including region, year of introduction, stage
of implementation, or technical features, are associated with a greater likelihood of the program being linked
with different types of functions, and specifically to finance and health. Our ability to identify associations is
limited by the small sample size and by our definition of functional linkages, which only considers whether a
linkage exists but not how developed it is or the extent to which it is incorporated into the national ID program.
Though we cannot confidently report that many characteristics of national ID programs are associated with
particular functional linkages, we do identify a few trends.

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