Gathering eight country case studies from every region in Africa, this open access book explores who digital ID benefits and who it disadvantages. As technological advancements lead to widespread adoption of digital IDs across the world, concerns are emerging regarding their potential role in state control, surveillance, human rights abuses, and other political areas. When it comes to Africa, however, the effects of digital IDs remain very much misunderstood on both regional and global levels. While millions of African citizens benefit from the increased speed and convenience of being able to digitally verify their entitlement to certain services, many rural, elderly, illiterate, disabled, and stateless people are simultaneously now unable to access the same services - all while concerns around state control, surveillance, political influence, identity manipulation, and human rights abuses continue to grow. With each chapter written by senior or emerging African scholars, this book offers in-depth examinations of all these issues through the real-life experiences of everyday Africans, all while situating the introduction of digital ID within each country's specific political and economic context, as well as its pre-digital forms of identification and documentation. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Open access was funded by the Open Society Foundations.