Nigeria Upgrades Biometric System for Enhanced Citizen Identification

Nigeria is making a major technological leap with a significant upgrade to its national biometric identification system. This upgrade comes through a partnership between IDEMIA Smart Identity, a leading French provider of identity technologies, and the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC).

The new biometric system will be incredibly powerful, offering several key improvements:

• Capacity: The system will be able to store up to 250 million individual records, helping Nigeria provide identification for its entire population.
• Speed: It can perform an impressive 1 million identification checks each day.
• Global Alignment: The project has the backing of the World Bank, ensuring its alignment with international standards.

This upgrade ensures that every Nigerian citizen will have a unique and secure digital identity, enabling them to access important services and exercise their rights. Nigeria will now be in a stronger position to meet the United Nations goal of providing legal identity for all by 2030.

“We are very proud to continue our long-standing collaboration with NIMC for the greater good of Nigeria’s growing population. The new powerful system is future-proof and will ensure that all Nigerians have access to a secured, trusted identity, enabling them to exercise their rights and responsibilities as a citizen. Moreover, this contract, in the most populous country in Africa, demonstrates IDEMIA’s capability to deploy its technologies on a very large scale,” explains Olivier Charlanes, Senior Vice President of Middle East and Africa at IDEMIA Smart Identity.

“Taking this next step in the enhancement of our system with IDEMIA Smart Identity was a natural choice for us. We wanted to ensure that we deliver the best-in-class solution to our fellow Nigerians, and the pure power of the biometric matching we will receive ensures that the solution is future-proof for our growing population,” explains Engr. Abisoye Coker-Odusote, CEO, National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) and Chairman of the OSIA Advisory Committee.

With a global team of nearly 15,000 employees, IDEMIA Group is trusted by over 600 governmental organisations and more than 2,400 enterprises in over 180 countries.