From Bullies to Officers and Gentlemen

Biometric identification technologies and the Ghanaian ‘data revolution’

“…We start in Accra, but even there we need to test it first.’ 29 Accompanied by an intensive public outreach programme including the online dissemination of informational videos, the mass registration set off in Accra in May 2018, first targeting service personnel of the Ghana Police and Armed Forces, along with some ministerial staff. Deliberately targeting citizens who by default possess birth certificates due to their professional status, operate in efficiently structured organisational settings and can hence easily be mobilised for the registration exercise (through so-called ‘Part I’ orders; Agyekum 2019), to some extent levelled the technical challenges encountered in the initial phase of the Ghanacard's latest roll-out strategy. Although reports about the latest mass registration are fraught with criticism about the slow pace of the exercise, the breakdown of infrastructure, 30 as well as renewed irregularities – notably registration incidents after the official closing times of the registration centres and police investigations into the registration of non-citizens – the strategy of the NIA to roll out gradually and based on the experiences of the pilot appears to work.…”