Legal identity: existing in the registries to access rights

There is one inequality that precedes all the others: not existing in the eyes of the State. Worldwide, roughly 850 million people hold no proof of official identity, nearly one person in nine, and more than half of them live in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is not just another administrative statistic. It is the starting point of exclusion: without a name recorded in a registry, you cannot open a bank account, you do not receive targeted public assistance, you cannot obtain a SIM card, and you may not always vote. In West Africa, adult identity coverage ranges from 47% in Benin to nearly 90% in Burkina Faso, and this gap, contrary to common belief, is neither a geographic inevitability nor a lack of technology. It is a matter of public policy choice, and first of all a matter of measurement choice.

One region, starkly unequal identity coverage

World Bank data, drawn from the Identification for Development (ID4D) programme linked to the Global Findex, reveals a striking spread. At the top, Burkina Faso (90.2%), Senegal (89.2%) and Ghana (87.9%) approach universal adult coverage. At the other extreme, Niger tops out at 53.1% and Benin at 47.0%, that is fewer than one adult in two holding an official identity document. Benin thus ranks among the lowest rates in the sub-region, within a group where the Sub-Saharan average of adults holding an identity stood at 78% in 2021. One caveat of reading is in order: the most recent figure available for Benin dates from 2021, whereas most other countries have a 2024 data point. Direct comparison must therefore be handled with this timing caution. It does not erase the underlying finding: in this region, the map of identity does not overlap with the map of wealth or of climate, but with the map of registration policies.

What this ranking reveals is more disturbing than a mere lag. The two countries at the back of the pack, Niger and Benin, are neither the poorest, nor the largest, nor the most landlocked in the region. Burkina Faso, in the lead, shares with Niger a Sahelian climate, a rural demographic and comparable budgetary constraints. Yet more than forty points of identity coverage separate them. When two neighbouring countries with similar natural conditions show gaps of this magnitude, the explanatory variable is no longer geography: it is administrative organisation, the density of enrolment offices and the consistency of public effort. In other words, the identity gap is not a state of affairs simply endured, but the cumulative result of decisions, or of their absence.

The identity document, that key which opens every door

Legal identity has no value in itself: it is worth what it unlocks. It is the condition of access to almost all modern services, public and private alike. Without it, economic and civic life shrinks to an informal perimeter where credit, secure savings and social protection have no place. ID4D data makes it possible to quantify this lockout precisely, by directly asking adults who have no identity document about the difficulties they encounter.

The result is unambiguous. In Senegal, 52.2% of adults without an identity report that this lack causes them difficulties in using financial services, and 74.1% in taking part in elections: civic exclusion strikes almost all of those without papers. In Ghana, where SIM card registration is mandatory, 67.1% of adults without an identity struggle to obtain a phone line, which at the same time deprives them of mobile money, now the region's main channel of financial inclusion. The absence of an identity document is therefore not a mere administrative inconvenience: it is a cascading lock, closing one door after another.

• The bank or mobile money account. Identity is required at opening: in Senegal, more than one adult without papers in two (52.2%) reports difficulties in accessing financial services, which keeps them away from credit, secure savings and formal transfers.
• The SIM card and mobile money. Where SIM registration is mandatory, the absence of an identity cuts off access to telephony and thus to the leading channel of financial inclusion: 67.1% of adults without papers in Ghana, 51.7% in Nigeria.
• Public assistance and citizenship. Without an identity, one is neither targeted by a social transfer nor placed on the rolls: in Senegal, 30.9% struggle to receive public assistance and 74.1% to take part in elections.

Legal identity has no value in itself. It is worth what it unlocks: the account, the benefit, the phone line, the ballot. Without it, citizenship is reduced to an informal perimeter.

The identity gap extends into a financial gap

The link between identity and financial inclusion is not theoretical: it can be read in the trajectory of regional banking access. Over the past decade, account ownership, whether in a bank or in mobile money, has risen sharply in several countries. Senegal went from 5.8% of adults holding an account in 2011 to 76.5% in 2024, and Ghana from 29.4% to 81.2%. Benin followed a more modest upward slope, from 10.5% to 51.8%. But this momentum is by no means automatic: Niger, for its part, is stagnating, moving from 15.5% in 2017 to 14.8% in 2024, a decline that accompanies precisely the weakness of its identity coverage. Where identity advances, the account follows; where it stalls, financial inclusion stalls too.

This link stems from a concrete mechanism, and not from a mere correlation. When opening an account, in a bank as with a mobile money operator, regulation requires verification of the client's identity, the procedure known as know-your-customer. A valid identity document is therefore the first item in the file, literally the condition of entry. Without it, the door to financial inclusion stays shut, whatever the will to save or to borrow. This bottleneck ripples through the entire chain: no account, therefore no transaction history, therefore no access to formal microcredit, therefore a forced recourse to informal circuits, more expensive and less secure. The identity gap does not only curtail access to an account: it deprives people of an entire financial trajectory.

What identity is worth: up to 6% of GDP in emerging economies

Long treated as an administrative operating expense, identity is in reality a high-return investment, and now quantified. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, a widely adopted digital identity system can unlock economic value equivalent to 3 to 13% of GDP by 2030 depending on the country, with a potential of the order of 6% of GDP in emerging economies against 3% in mature economies, provided there is strong adoption and multiple value-added uses. This gain does not fall from the sky: it comes from reduced fraud, lower transaction costs, the formalisation of part of the informal economy and, above all, the financial inclusion of populations until now outside the system. Applied to West Africa, where informality dominates and financial inclusion remains incomplete, this figure places the identity question not in the category of expenses, but in that of growth levers.

This reading changes the budgetary trade-off. A finance minister who sees identity enrolment as a cost will always push it behind priorities judged more urgent. The same minister, if he reads identity as an economic infrastructure on a par with a road or an electricity grid, will integrate it into his growth strategy. The McKinsey figure is illustrative and assumes demanding adoption conditions, but it sets an order of magnitude: in a region where several countries leave nearly half of their adults outside the registries, the potential of unrealised value is counted in points of GDP, every year, for as long as the gap persists.

The gap has a gender: women are the first excluded

The national average masks a divide that runs through every country: that of gender. In the ownership of an identity document, women remain systematically less covered than men. The most extreme case is that of Niger, where 63.5% of men hold an identity against 43.4% of women, nearly 20 points of gap, one of the largest in the world (the World Bank documents 19 points). In Benin, the gap reaches 11 points (52.6% of men against 41.7% of women), with no notable difference between rich and poor but with a strong urban-rural divide. Across low-income countries, women remain on average 8 points less likely than men to hold an identity document.

This identity gap is not an abstraction: it extends directly into financial exclusion. In Niger, only 12.2% of women hold an account, in a bank or in mobile money, the lowest rate in the sub-region, against 17.6% for men. The identity gap and the financial gap then accumulate on the same people, in the same place. A woman without an identity document is a woman without an account, without formal credit, without direct access to social transfers: three exclusions that amount to one, and that are often passed on to the entire household.

The origin of this gap deserves to be named, for it dictates the response. Women run up more often than men against the prior obstacles: they are more frequently without a birth certificate, less mobile to reach a distant office, less often able to advance the cost of a procedure, and sometimes held back by procedures that require the presence or the consent of a third party. The female deficit is therefore not a lesser interest in identity, but the accumulation of barriers that the national average erases. A gender-blind enrolment campaign will mechanically reproduce this gap; only a campaign that explicitly targets women, with adapted offices and hours, can reduce it.

Why they have no papers: concrete obstacles, not a refusal

The received idea would have it that people without an identity have simply neglected a procedure. The data belies this prejudice: the obstacles are material, financial and geographic well before being a lack of motivation. Asked about the reasons for their absence of papers, adults without an identity in West Africa cite first the lack of the required documents (41.3% on average), that is the absence of a birth certificate or a prior supporting document, then the distance of the office (35.1%) and the cost of the procedure (34.9%). The feeling of not needing one comes only in fourth position (23.9%). In other words, the majority of those who have no identity document would like one, but run up against an administrative path out of reach.

The root of the problem: the child who was never registered

The first obstacle cited by adults without papers, the absence of the required documents, points to a failure located well upstream: birth registration. An identity document is obtained on presentation of a birth certificate; without this founding record, the administrative chain is broken from the start. Yet Africa concentrates the majority of the planet's unregistered children: according to UNICEF, more than half of the world's unregistered children under five live on the continent. In West Africa, birth registration coverage tops out at around 63%, far behind Southern Africa (about 88%) and far from the universality targeted by SDG target 16.9, which promises a legal identity for all, including birth registration, by 2030.

This figure casts the adult deficit in a new light. A country that does not register its newborns manufactures, year after year, a cohort of future adults without proof of existence, condemned to begin their civic life with a costly and uncertain catch-up procedure. Conversely, a country that systematically registers its births dries up the source of the deficit: every registered child is an adult who will not have to prove after the fact that he exists. This is why the battle for identity is won first at the maternity ward and at the communal civil registry, not only at the adult enrolment office. To neglect birth registration is to empty a leaking barrel.

What the averages hide: the geography of exclusion

A national identity coverage rate is an average, and averages mask the essential. The deficit is not distributed uniformly: it concentrates on specific populations, women, young people, rural residents, the least educated and the poorest. In Benin, the urban-rural gap is marked, while the gap between rich and poor is less so; elsewhere, it is the reverse. Effectively targeting an inclusion policy therefore requires knowing precisely where and who the people without papers are, something an aggregate indicator will never tell. An enrolment campaign designed for the cities will miss the most remote villages, where the deficit is deepest.

Digital coverage adds a layer to this divide. In Benin, despite the deployment of foundational identity systems, only 15.0% of adults hold a digital or online identity. The modernisation of the registries, indispensable as it is, does not mechanically close the basic gap: it may even widen it if the most excluded populations, for lack of access and literacy, remain outside the digital system. Digital is an accelerator of inclusion for those already in the system, and an additional factor of exclusion for those who are not yet in it.

The cost of inaction: statistical invisibility

The absence of a legal identity carries a cost that extends beyond the person concerned: it renders populations invisible to public policies. A citizen without papers appears in no social registry; he therefore cannot be targeted by a cash transfer, enrolled in a health coverage programme, or counted for the opening of a school or a health centre. Every benefit not paid and every account not opened represents a lasting economic exclusion for the household and an opportunity cost for the State, which then steers part of its population blind. Informality is not only endured by individuals: it deprives public authority of its targeting instruments.

This cost is all the higher as the deficit is massive. In Benin, 53% of adults had no official identity document in 2021: more than one adult in two off the administrative radar, the order of magnitude of a national undertaking and not of a marginal adjustment. Worldwide, of the 850 million people without an identity, about 55% live in Sub-Saharan Africa, that is nearly 470 million individuals. This figure includes children whose birth was never registered, and it must not be confused with the rate of identity ownership among adults (78% in 2021): it measures the total population without proof of legal existence, adults and children combined. The two scopes tell the same urgency from two angles.

Statistical invisibility is also paid for during shocks. A health crisis, a flood, a price surge call for a targeted emergency response: distributing aid, vaccinating, rescuing. Yet one rescues well only what one has registered beforehand. When a significant share of the population exists in no registry, the State responds in the emergency blindly, sprays broadly and wastes, or worse, leaves aside the most vulnerable, precisely those who combine the absence of papers, poverty and remoteness. The identity gap is therefore not only a brake in normal times: it turns every crisis into a targeting crisis, at the moment when precision matters most.

A global challenge, an African concentration

The identity gap is not a West African peculiarity: it is a global challenge of which Sub-Saharan Africa bears the heaviest share. On the planet, one person in nine cannot legally prove their existence, and more than half of those concerned live south of the Sahara. This finding calls for a careful reading of the figures, for the sources evolve: the reference ID4D report puts the global total at about 850 million for 2021-2022, while a later update revises it to about 800 million and raises adult identity coverage in Sub-Saharan Africa from 78% (2021) to 81%. We retain here the value of 850 million for 2021-2022 while flagging it explicitly, rather than mixing vintages. A figure that is declining, but that still leaves hundreds of millions of people without legal proof of existence.

More than one Beninese adult in two exists in no official registry. This is not a marginal adjustment: it is half of an adult population that remains to be integrated into the identity system.

The CRAD angle: identity, the cross-cutting foundation of every policy

CRAD notes that identity data is the cross-cutting foundation of every development policy. Without reliable registries, neither the targeting of benefits, nor universal health coverage, nor the monitoring and evaluation of programmes are truly possible: one can neither count, nor track, nor evaluate a population that does not exist administratively. This is why the identity question is not reduced to a card-issuance project: it conditions the credibility of the whole of public action and of the data that underpins it.

This is precisely CRAD's line of work on information systems. Our field surveys, systematically disaggregated by sex, by place of residence and by living standard, allow States and funders to measure the blind spots of identity coverage, where they really are, and to anchor measurable inclusion programmes to them. Mapping people without papers by area and by profile means transforming a national rate into an operational roadmap, and moving identity policy from intention to precision. Geolocated digital collection, campaign-by-campaign tracking and fine disaggregation are the instruments that give the identity undertaking its compass.

This approach through disaggregated data is not a methodological refinement: it decides the effectiveness of every franc invested. The same enrolment budget does not produce the same inclusion depending on whether it targets the areas and profiles where the deficit is deepest or whether it rakes indiscriminately where coverage is already good. Measuring finely who remains without papers, woman or man, young or old, in the city or in the village, means offering the decision-maker the map that most identity programmes in the region lack. Without this map, public investment advances gropingly; with it, it concentrates the effort where it genuinely changes a life.

Fundamentally, the West African identity gap is not an unsolved technical problem: the registration systems exist, and Togo has shown that they can gain 22 points in three years. It is a problem of political priority and of steering by data. The countries that progress are those that treat identity as a basic infrastructure, on a par with the road or electricity, and that measure who remains by the wayside. To exist in the registries is not a formality: it is the first step of citizenship and of economic inclusion.

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