Biometric identification technologies and the Ghanaian ‘data revolution’

Alena Thiel

doi:10.1017/s0022278x19000600

Abstract

AbstractIn the global effort to strengthen national identification systems (SDG 16.9), biometric identification technologies and civil registration systems have been associated with different motives and applications, thus fuelling their competition for public attention and resources. The case of Ghana illustrates how these alternative systems, along with further sources of personal data, have recently been integrated into the larger political vision of a centralised, national population data system. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper traces the difficulties and institutional negotiations that accompany this integration into a centralised population data infrastructure. Acknowledging how sets of actors, infrastructures and power relations are layered onto each other to unintended effects, the article describes the historical process of institutional and infrastructural harmonisation in the production of biometric population registers in Ghana.

Highlights

A number of African countries, most prominently Kenya (Breckenridge ), have recently embarked on the process of transforming their population data systems with the aim of harnessing the potential of new data types and Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core
How do different expectations of using and ways of formatting identification data come to play out against each other in the new Ghanaian vision of an interoperability-based, integrated population data system? Which political assumptions are imbued in the decisions around these state practices and in which ways can the ethnographic engagement with these practices help to reflect the complexity of reorganising state information infrastructures?
When Ghanaian President Akufo-Addo in his speech at the African Open Data Conference expressed the commitment of his administration to integrate the population data architecture, he crucially linked this vision to the improvement of development planning and the high-level political commitment to global development reporting, emphasised not least by Ghana’s international role in SDG advocacy

Summary

INTRODUCTION

A number of African countries, most prominently Kenya (Breckenridge ), have recently embarked on the process of transforming their population data systems with the aim of harnessing the potential of new data types and. In other words, in layered and emerging settings, in which a wide range of actors – explicitly including different kinds of experts (technical, legal, financial), material devices (biometric technologies) and images of the state – interrelate, influence each other and participate in the production of new orders (Behrends et al ). This focus on the ways in which ordering practices emerge, stabilise, adapt or break down, emphasises the multiplicities and incoherencies in entangled actor constellations as well as actors’ habitual practices which often are not (yet) codified in formal terms. How do different expectations of using and ways of formatting identification data come to play out against each other in the new Ghanaian vision of an interoperability-based, integrated population data system? Which political assumptions are imbued in the decisions around these state practices and in which ways can the ethnographic engagement with these practices help to reflect the complexity of reorganising state information infrastructures?

METHODS

CONCLUSION