Digital and Technologies
Who is left out of digital ID? Measuring the inclusivity of Sierra Leone’s digital public infrastructure
Sierra Leone’s country study in the Global Development Network’s Digital Public Infrastructure Inclusivity Measurement Programme, on who the national biometric ID system reaches and who it leaves behind.
Since 1 January 2025 the National Civil Registration Authority’s (NCRA) biometric National Identity Card has been effectively required in Sierra Leone. It is the way into SIM registration, mobile money, formal banking, voter registration, Free Health Care and social protection. NCRA reports around 93% coverage. Being outside the system is no longer only a missing record: it shuts people out of the digital economy, their health entitlements and civic life at once.
IfD is Sierra Leone’s national research team in the Global Development Network’s (GDN) Digital Public Infrastructure Inclusivity Measurement Programme, which studies national digital systems in several countries with a shared framework. The study asks two questions: who is in the remaining 7%, and what happens inside the 93%, for people who are enrolled but whose card fails at the point of use, or who cannot transact.
It follows GDN’s four stages of inclusion (access, enrolment, meaningful engagement, and belonging and rights) through:
- a nationally representative household survey, stratified across the provinces, with the Northern and Eastern provinces oversampled as the regions where exclusion is highest;
- a deep dive with four lenses: community mapping of how exclusion happens in practice, peer research in which persons with disabilities interview other persons with disabilities, interviews with the people who run the system, and digital narratives;
- fieldwork in English, Krio, Temne, Mende and Fula.
The findings are timed for decisions already scheduled in 2027: amendments to the civil registration law, NCRA’s move to a new platform, and the design of how the Bank of Sierra Leone and government systems share data. A reform coalition on digital ID inclusion, bringing together NCRA, the Bank of Sierra Leone, disability rights organisations, women traders’ associations and a mobile-money operator, takes the evidence to those decisions. The results will also be published on Sabi Salone, and digital inclusion will be a track at the National Evidence Summit 2027.
