Mobile phonicide in identity management. Reassessing the case of Ghana's m-birth.

Ghana’s identity management is in peril. Just a year ago, government pulled the rug from under the country’s Births and Deaths Registry when it passed new civil registration law. Civil registration provides the indispensable foundation for identity management at large; national ID, passport issuance, voter registration  and for thorough identity verification, when and where required. Thus far BDR operated as a deconcentrated organization  required when delegation to local government is unrealistic  as it (still) is in Ghana. Ghanaian local government is extremely weak, and being kept so. BDR has managed to lift birth registration coverage from about 25% some 15 to 20 years ago to 70% currently. Death registration coverage has remained stuck at about 25% though. In 2015 BDR introduced the promising use of mobile phone to address a universal service accessibility problem for, mainly, the rural population. The “m-birth project” was evaluated in 2018. This “twinned paper” provides a re-assessment that finds that the evaluation was of mediocre quality and overstates project outcomes. As an essential digitization project, judged on what was accomplished, m-birth may actually have been “good enough”. Out of probably close to a hundred similar “mCRVS” projects conducted globally since 2005, m-birth has been one of very few that have been evaluated (implying a serious fault in accountability across the aid community). The decentralization of civil registration required by new Ghanaian civil registration law may result in the write-off of the m-birth project. In the meantime, the current government launched an exceptionally expensive national ID project costing USD 1.22 billion in 2017, through a single source award-cum-BOT contract, at a global record per person cost. By October 2020 70% of the eligible population (15 years and older) had been enrolled (not independently confirmed), skewed more towards the better-off than in any other country’s documented case. It will be hard to achieve universal enrolment. Uganda has run into a brick wall, because of the same flawed approach as Ghana has adopted. Also, recently Ghana’s Supreme Court decided that birth certificates are not proof of citizenship. This cannot but spring major popular reaction, e.g., in the form of the wide popular unrest as occurred in India by the end of 2019. The twin to this paper (https://tinyurl.com/2t354h6m) also probes the excessive election administration cost in Ghana. Had the country prioritized laying the civil registration foundation first (as in South Africa and some other African countries such as Botswana, Egypt and Tunisia), both national ID and election administration would be in better condition now. At the root of this slowly but surely moving train wreck is plutocratic rule, sliding towards kakistocracy. Organizational unravelling of both civil registration and national ID (the country’s 2nd serious attempt) is now all but certain, which will imperil Ghana’s grand digital ambition, its economy and democracy. The twin to this paper, cf. https://tinyurl.com/2t354h6m makes suggestions what could and should now be done in identity management, some of it urgently, and why.