Africa doesn’t have an identity problem; it has a trust infrastructure problem

By Kelechi Ndieze

We’ve spent the better part of a decade trying to “solve identity” in Africa. Governments have rolled out national ID programmes at scale. Nigeria alone has enrolled over 100 million people into the NIN system, while the BVN system has captured over 60 million banked individuals.

Across the continent, similar efforts are underway, from Ghana Card to Kenya’s Huduma Namba. On paper, that looks like progress. In practice, very little has changed. Because the problem was never the absence of identity. It was the absence of trust between systems.

See also: The digital heist: Inside Africa’s $4B SIM swap and identity theft fraud crisis

If identity were truly solved, onboarding wouldn’t still feel like starting from zero every time. You wouldn’t open a bank account and still be asked to verify what another institution has already verified. You wouldn’t move across platforms and leave your history behind like it never existed. What we call an identity system today is really just a collection of isolated records. Each institution maintains its own version of who you are. None of them fully trust each other. So they rebuild verification, again and again, at a cost to themselves and friction to the user.

Ghana card

According to the World Bank, financial institutions can spend up to $15–25 per customer on KYC processes in emerging markets, with repeated verification across platforms compounding that cost. For users, this translates to delays, drop-offs, and exclusion. That’s not an identity layer. That’s duplication at scale. This is not good for business. The issue is simpler and harder than we’ve framed it. Trust doesn’t move. That’s the gap.

Making identity work in Africa

In more integrated ecosystems, identity works not because it exists, but because it’s accepted. Estonia, for instance, has built a system where over 99% of public services are accessible digitally, anchored on a trusted, interoperable identity layer. Africa has taken a different path one where identity is issued, but not easily reused. And because it isn’t reusable, everything built on top of it becomes inefficient by default.

Credit struggles because there’s no shared view of risk. Payments fragment because systems don’t reconcile cleanly. Platforms operate in silos because there’s no common layer to anchor on. The result is visible in the numbers: despite progress, over 350 million adults in Sub-Saharan Africa remain unbanked, according to the Global Findex Database. Not because they cannot be identified but because they cannot be trusted across systems.

If you shift the lens from identity to trust, the path forward becomes clearer. The question is no longer: How do we identify more people? It becomes: How do we make identity usable across systems without re-verification? How do we allow credentials to travel? How do we create a layer other systems can rely on, not just reference?

That’s a different class of problem. It’s not about databases. It’s about coordination. And this is where most efforts stall. Because building trust infrastructure requires alignment across regulators, financial institutions, and platforms. It requires standards, not just systems. But the economic upside is significant.

Kelechi Ndieze

McKinsey estimates that effective digital ID systems could unlock 3–13% of GDP value in emerging economies by 2030, through increased financial inclusion, productivity gains, and reduced fraud. That’s not marginal impact. That’s structural. 

Interestingly, there are early efforts beginning to tackle this problem from an infrastructure standpoint, quietly rethinking how identity can become portable, verifiable, and usable across ecosystems. E.g. The Tulupay’s, Tulu Identity, exploring this layer not as another database, but as a trust framework designed to sit between systems and make verification reusable.

The irony is, we’re closer than we think. The data exists. The systems exist. The users are already participating digitally. What’s missing is the connective tissue, the layer that allows trust to move. Until that layer exists, we’ll keep mistaking activity for progress. More registrations. More integrations. More patches. But the experience won’t fundamentally improve. Because identity, without trust, doesn’t do much. It just sits there.

About the Author

Kelechi Ndieze is a Senior Product Manager,  strategist and digital ecosystem advocate with interests in technology innovation, entrepreneurship, and Africa’s digital transformation.