- Kenya: working with France’s IN Groupe on trusted, interoperable digital identity infrastructure
- Ethiopia: Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed says Fayda could lift GDP by 7%
- Zimbabwe: central bank flags cyber weaknesses, fake accounts, and fragile digital payment rails
The common thread is straightforward: digital identity and digital payments can make governments faster and finance more accessible, but only if the systems are secure, usable, and run like critical infrastructure instead of political vanity projects.
Kenya is pushing first on the identity side.
On August 20, ICT and Digital Economy Cabinet Secretary William Kabogo met with IN Groupe Vice President for Government Programs Céline Gouveia to discuss a “trusted, interoperable digital identity for Kenya.” The goal, according to Kabogo, is to improve coordinated governance of Kenya’s digital public infrastructure, reduce duplication, and build public trust in digital identity and government services.
That word interoperable matters. It means different government systems can talk to each other without forcing citizens to keep proving the same facts over and over again. In plain English: one identity should work across agencies, not trap people in a maze of separate databases and logins.
Digital public infrastructure is the broader framework underneath that idea, shared digital rails for identity, payments, and data exchange. Done well, it can cut friction and corruption. Done badly, it becomes a centralized mess with a privacy problem attached.
IN Groupe is not new to Kenya’s setup. The company supplied the PKI platform through Nexus for Kenya’s Government Certification Authority under the National Public Key Infrastructure project in 2023. PKI, or Public Key Infrastructure, is the cryptographic system that helps secure digital certificates and verify that online interactions are legitimate. It is one of those unglamorous pieces of plumbing that nobody notices until it fails, and then everyone notices.
Kenya also created a new Directorate of eCitizen Services in 2023 to scale up the eCitizen platform, which reportedly gives access to more than 20, 000 government services. If that figure holds, it shows the size of the opportunity. A working digital government portal can save time, reduce paperwork, and limit the number of places where nonsense and bribery can hide.
But the upside only matters if citizens trust the system. Digital ID is not just a database of names and numbers. It decides who can prove who they are, who can access services, and how much control the state has over that process. If privacy protections are weak, “efficiency” quickly starts to sound like a euphemism for surveillance.
Ethiopia is making a much bolder economic claim.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said the country’s Fayda digital identification system could increase GDP by 7%. That should be read as a projection, not a guaranteed outcome. Digital ID can lower onboarding costs, improve access to public services, and make financial and administrative systems more efficient. It does not magically produce growth on its own.
Fayda combines biometric and demographic data and assigns each registered person a unique identification number. Biometric data includes physical identifiers such as fingerprints or facial data. Demographic data includes information like name, age, sex, or residence. That mix makes identity verification easier, but it also raises the stakes: if those details are compromised, you cannot simply change your fingerprints the way you change a password.
According to the figures cited, Fayda has aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the African Union’s Agenda 2063. Since its rollout in 2023, almost 50 million citizens have registered, and the system has been integrated into more than 150 public and private institutions.
The target is 115 million registered users by the 2027-2028 financial year. That is a serious scale-up, and the real test will be whether the system reaches people cleanly and securely, not just quickly. Big enrollment numbers look great in a press release. They matter less if the registration process is uneven, if the data handling is sloppy, or if the ID becomes a tool for exclusion instead of access.
Zimbabwe is dealing with the less glamorous part of the same story, the operational and cyber risk that comes with digitized payments.
The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe says it has identified problems in the country’s digital payments ecosystem and wants stronger cybersecurity controls. Governor John Mushayavanhu said recent cybersecurity breach incidents exposed vulnerabilities in third-party service providers, payment channels, and digital banking ecosystems. His warning is blunt, and for good reason: the weakest link in modern finance is often not the bank itself, but the vendor, processor, or integration point sitting behind it.
“cybersecurity breach incidents” have “highlighted some vulnerabilities in third-party service providers, payment channels, and digital banking” ecosystems.
“This reinforces the need for continuous strengthening of cyber controls, incident response and operational resilience across the sector.”
The central bank is right to press the issue. Stronger cyber controls are not optional fluff anymore. They are the difference between a functioning digital payments system and a machine that is one bad breach away from embarrassment.
The RBZ also urged financial and mobile companies to share cyber threat intelligence in a timely and systematic way. It asked banking institutions, mobile operators, and digital payment service providers to remove ghost, fictitious, and duplicate accounts to reduce fraud and cybersecurity breaches. Fake accounts are not a minor bookkeeping annoyance. They create room for abuse, distort customer data, and make fraud easier to hide.
Zimbabwe’s payments adoption remains low, and the reasons are very familiar: trust, reliability, and affordability. Only 36% of deployed point-of-sale machines are active. The country has roughly 6.8 million credit cards in circulation, just over 586, 605 internet banking users, and 193, 000 prepaid cards, mostly used for international e-commerce payments.
That is not a thriving digital payments market. It is a market that exists, but with too many people and merchants still unconvinced that the rails are dependable enough to rely on every day.
The comparison with Nigeria and Kenya helps put the gap in context, even if the metrics are not identical. Nigeria’s Central Bank reported over 5.6 billion NIBSS Instant Payment transactions in the first half of 2024, worth N476.89 trillion ($354.05 billion). Web transactions reached 11.6 billion, or N825.5 trillion ($612.52 billion). As of December 2024, Kenya had 82.4 million registered mobile-money accounts and almost 12.9 million cardholders.
Those figures measure different things, so this is not a neat apples-to-apples comparison. But the scale difference is still obvious. Nigeria and Kenya have built payment ecosystems that people actually use because the rails are more mature and the trust level is higher. Zimbabwe is still trying to get the basics right.
That is the real regional lesson here. Digital identity and digital payments are not separate projects anymore. They are linked. Weak identity systems make fraud easier. Weak payments systems make digital government look pointless. Weak cyber controls turn both into liabilities.
The upside remains real. Secure digital ID can help people access services faster, reduce duplication, and support financial inclusion. Better digital payments can lower transaction costs and bring more people into formal systems. For countries trying to modernize, that is not trivial. It is the kind of infrastructure that can shave friction out of everyday life and reduce the amount of time citizens spend begging a broken system to function.
But none of it works on vibes. It needs governance, interoperability, privacy protections, incident response, and a willingness to treat digital trust as a hard requirement rather than a talking point. Centralizing identity and payments can be useful. It can also be dangerous if the safeguards are flimsy.
Key questions and takeaways
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Can digital ID help economic growth?
Yes, but only indirectly and only if the system is well designed. Ethiopia’s 7% GDP figure for Fayda is a projection, not a certainty, and the real gains would come from lower onboarding costs, better service delivery, and more people entering formal systems. -
Why is Kenya focusing on interoperability?
Because separate systems waste money and frustrate users. Interoperability lets different agencies and services share a common identity layer instead of forcing people to repeat the same process over and over. -
What does PKI do?
PKI secures digital communications and identity verification using cryptographic certificates. It helps prove that a digital transaction or login is legitimate rather than fake or tampered with. -
Why are biometric systems sensitive?
Biometrics can make identity checks more reliable, but if the data is exposed, it is hard to replace. That makes privacy, storage, and access controls absolutely critical. -
What is Zimbabwe’s biggest digital payments problem?
Trust. The RBZ is warning about cyber weaknesses, fake accounts, and third-party vulnerabilities, while adoption remains held back by reliability and affordability concerns. -
What is the biggest risk across all three countries?
Building centralized digital systems without enough security or oversight. If the rails are weak, the same infrastructure meant to expand access can also magnify fraud, surveillance, and systemic failures.
The bottom line is plain: digital identity and digital payments can be powerful tools for inclusion and efficiency, but only if governments build them with serious security and sane governance. Otherwise, they are just expensive centralized systems waiting for the first real hit.
Worldcoin has already run face-first into regulatory pushback in Kenya and elsewhere, which is a useful reminder that “digital identity” is not automatically a public good just because it comes wrapped in futuristic branding.
And for all the talk of rails and IDs, the real-world bridge to useful crypto adoption may still be practical payments that people already understand. That is why work around Bitcoin Lightning and Kenya’s M-Pesa matters more than another glossy pitch deck promising to reinvent finance with a token and a prayer.
