Identity inclusion comes before digital inclusion and it will lead to digital commerce inclusion (DCI). DCI improves a nation’s tax base while at the same time creating wealth. This is how India is going about it without shouting ”financial inclusion” daily and doing nothing.

@justinijeh blew my mind in his chat with @BWLawal yesterday when he revealed that the Indian national ID project was derived from the initial attempt in Nigeria. I was already writing a new rant against the wrong priorities in what we call ”financial inclusion,” I hate that term

Why do you want to include people into an archaic model that they are noncosumers of for good reasons? People keep saying the Nigerian poor don't have BVN because they don't have bank accounts but you tried to register them and didn't see the opportunity there as a first step?

People without any form of digital identification will not be part of any viable system that can scale. Jio and Facebook are now reaping the benefits of a system already at scale. I have ALWAYS said that scale builds on scale. In African countries, this is what is holding us back

There is no incentive for politicians to have digital identification at scale as it reveals the lies their ”political power” and calculations have been built upon. This has to be solved in other ways by the private sector and local communities. Community ID is the way forward.

If you can prove to communities like estates and villages that is in their interest to have common identity platforms for security and financial purposes, it will change everything. It doesn't invalidate the government ID but can even complement it.

Each community can personalize their physical ID cards but as long as each person’s identifier is unique and there is a uniform structure between communities, it becomes a universal database which can be authenticated as the identified is linked to other digital footprints.

Community is at the heart of our African social and commerce structure. Ignoring it has been why we have never been able to get things right. Those who have leveraged on it like the FMCG and telcos are at scale. They will be in the best position to lead this initiative too.

SIM registration is already a building block of a more robust community ID system. The rest does not need government permission to build.