Somalia is in the process of implementing a national digital ID system, and the country needs an estimated $125 million to fully roll out the program.
The Director General of the National Identity Registration Authority (NIRA), Abdiwali Ali Abdulle, disclosed this information in a recent interview to Dawan Media. According to Abdulle, only a fifth of the total estimated budget has so far been obtained.
Somalia’s national digital ID was launched in 2023 under a project with funding support by the World Bank. The objective is to enable every citizen obtain legal identity in line with SDG 16.9, and to make identity a tool for easily accessing a wide range of services from government and private sector entities. The World Bank is the main financier of the identity project through a Development Policy Funding (DPF) arrangement, but it is not the sole source of funding.
At the close of last year, NIRA said more than one million citizens already had a national ID, quite a distance away from the 15 million target which the ID authority intends to meet in the next four years.
Speaking on the Dawan Media Miizaan podcast, Abdulle explained some of the challenges NIRA faces, and how they are working to navigate them. Abdulle had discussed some of these challenges last year in an interview with Biometric Update on the sidelines of the 2025 ID4Africa AGM in Ethiopia.
“The plan we have set requires $125 million for this program to be implemented nationwide so that every citizen receives a national ID card,” Abdulle is quoted by Dawan Media.
The official further stated that to meet their objectives, they have designed a five-year strategy which aligns with the country’s National Transformation Plan. To Abdulle, the panoply of challenges notwithstanding, their strategy is to ensure that ID cards are issued in an inclusive manner to citizens in all parts of the country.
In the interview, Abdulle also discussed issues related to fees charged for ID issuance, some reports of corruption regarding the NIRA, digital security and data protection mechanism, capacity of the system and sovereignty, and service integration efforts
This year, NIRA says there is a plan to integrate more government services with the national ID as part of the strategy not only to drive adoption, but to make it easier for citizens to be identified while accessing public services.
The ID project is said to be an important player in the World Bank-supported SPRING initiative. SPRING is acronym for Somalia Productive, Resilience and Inclusive Growth, a project that has been designed to support efforts driven largely by the private sector to create jobs and grow the digital economy.
