Addis Ababa to Introduce Digital Kebele IDs, Fully Automated Civil Services

A city-wide infrastructure to enable E-ID and fully digitized civil registration and vital statistics services is set to be unveiled by the Addis Ababa Civil Registration & Resident Services Agency (CRRSA) in the coming weeks. As part of an impetus to transform the capital into a smart city, the Agency will look for software partners to onboard onto its comprehensive digitization efforts.

A mobile application dubbed ‘Digital Kebele’ will grant residents access to CRRSA’s services while also enabling a digital ID that has a unique identifier verifiable by authorities.

Yonas Alemayehu, Director of the Agency, expects all hospitals in the capital to be equipped with automatic registration capacity for births and deaths, while courts can automatically update divorces and other matrimonial developments.

He says the ten-year-old system currently being used lags behind the contemporary demands of residents while failing to cater to the size of the population.

“Everyone will be able to access our services from the comfort of their own homes,” Yonas told Shega.

The director foresees smartphones providing a dual function like IDs in the near future, facilitating access to public transport and other resident services.

A seminar in which several research findings are set to be presented will be hosted by the Agency in two weeks, dubbed ‘Digital Civil Registration for Smart City’.

While Yonas aspires to streamline all of CRRSA’s services, he acknowledges the need for a certain painstaking procedure to enable efficient provision of resident services.

“We hope to cut the time it takes by at least half,” the director says.

The agency has bought 800 computers and established an internal data center, and it is waiting to onboard the software. The director hopes to eliminate the necessity of visiting Kebele offices by the end of next year.

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With nearly 40% of Ethiopians lacking proper documentation, a series of technology-backed initiatives have been launched by the government in a bid to address this gap. Fayda, a national ID project that is targeting to reach at least 90 million Ethiopians in five years, is one such project, with over 8 million registered so far.

Yonas explains that a resident city ID serves as a functional document tailored to the needs of dwellers within a specifically defined geographical territory.

“The projects complement each other but are not substitutable for one another,” he underscored.

As the Agency looks for partners to provide the software, the director met with the heads of Toppan Gravity Ethiopia, a joint venture between the Ethiopian government and the Japanese global leader in security printing.

The digitization of resident ID services in the capital is part of a larger, ambitious project closely supervised by City Hall to make Addis Ababa a smart city endowed with a comprehensive technology infrastructure. Facilitation of several public services through a smart infrastructure in an eco-friendly green city has been signaled as the overarching goal by authorities.