The Kenyan government is developing a plan to set up a biometric registry for its social welfare services, according to an AllAfrica article.
Various government officials got the ball rolling at the country’s
inaugural Social Protection Week convention, which kicked off at the end
of January.
The idea for biometric registration actual began to take shape last
year, when Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta issued a directive to the
Ministry of Labour, Social Security and Services about protecting the
vast sums allocated to protection of the country’s vulnerable; now, with
further funds to be distributed, the President says that 521,000
households will benefit by the end of the fiscal year. Moreover, last
spring the government announced plans to implement a biometric registry of citizens
for security purposes; employing such technology for the administration
of government welfare subsidies would seem a natural extension of that
line of thought.
It’s all very similar to India’s pioneering Aadhaar initiative,
which relies on fingerprint and iris scans. That program – the biggest
national biometrics project in the world – was launched with similar
aims, hoping to cut down on graft and waste in the government’s subsidies programs, while also giving citizens greater ease-of-access to government services,
among other benefits. If Kenya can succeed at pulling something similar
off, we may see a trend of countries with historically difficult
infrastructure issues suddenly finding some major solutions in the
deployment of digital and biometric technologies.
(http://findbiometrics.com)
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