Mwawi Ng’ombe, 24, decided to step out of her comfort zone when she was assigned as a National Registration Officer in Dowa district, a rural area about 30 kilometres east of her birthplace in Lilongwe, Malawi. Her day starts at 7 am and her job takes her from one district to the next as she helps thousands of Malawians acquire legal identity.
The registration process involves fingerprints, a digital photograph, and an electronic signature. “The official recognition of women’s presence has had a palpable impact on people,” says Mwawi. She finds it inspiring, watching the enthusiasm of Malawian women who often stand in line all night to register.
Mwawi and the registration team recall, with joy, the sight of an 86-year-old woman who had just registered for her card and was dancing and singing. “Finally, I exist!” This identity opened up a world of new possibilities, now that she could enjoy government health and social benefits. Over 10 million Malawians have been registered so far.
Having a legal identity is fundamental to human rights and UNDP is supporting civil registration and national ID systems in more than 25 countries, including Vanuatu, Honduras, Bangladesh, Palestine, Cameroon, Kenya and Zambia. National IDs also help governments centralize voter, education and birth registration.
In Vanuatu, national ID cards are being used not just for voting, but also for police clearances, passport applications, driver’s licenses domestic travel, opening a bank account, and education enrollment. When the Category 5 cyclone Harold hit the central and northern islands in March 2020, national ID cards helped with delivering domestic services and identifying displaced persons for early response and recovery efforts.
“The increased national ID coverage will allow the Ministry of Health to implement an improved patient information system in the coming years,” says Karel Haal, Health Economist at the Vanuatu Ministry of Health.
In Palestine, the Ministry of Interior, in partnership with the Ministry of Health and UNDP launched a digital birth and death registration system that will strengthen civil registration and provide reliable vital statistics for policymakers. The intervention comes as part of UNDP’s COVID-19 response and strategy to increase the government’s use of e-services.
Early results are also visible in Bangladesh. Sadia Akhter, 20, a mother of newborn twins in Kaliganj Upazilla, Gazipur District, recalls the nightmare her brother faced because of inconsistent information in his passport and birth certificate. “After my twin girls were born, health workers from the Upazilla health complex visited our home to gather information. A week later, my husband went to receive their birth certificates at the local councilor’s office. It was so simple! The same identity will work to both vaccinate them and enroll them in school.”
In Cameroon, UNDP is working with the government to manage civil registration and identity management systems, which has resulted in school students being able to obtain their birth certificates. Earlier, many students with no documentation were unable to sit official examinations, which led to a high number of dropouts.
The introduction of one unique identity has several benefits for citizens as well as the government. National ID programmes can significantly assist in the prevention of abuse of free national health care systems, eliminate ghost workers and ghost pensioners in public payrolls, reduce corruption and non-repayment of loans in the education sector, monitor real-time data to assist disaster response management, and establish efficient service delivery under social protection programmes.
UNDP has significant expertise in voter registration, but supporting governments as they implement national ID projects is a relatively new area, and one of the many approaches where multilateral partnership, in particular with other partners in the UN system, is key. To accomplish this, UNDP has been initiating linkages with numerous ministries, departments, civil society groups and UN country teams.
In Malawi, UNDP has also undertaken the mammoth task of training young people in technology-intensive projects that support the ID projects, which has meant opportunities for many, including those living with disabilities.
John Mwangonde, 34, from Mwambuli village in Karonga district, who has been a wheelchair user after contracting polio at the age of six, had almost lost hope of ever working even after getting his college degree. When he received an opportunity to be enrolled as a national registration officer a new world opened up.
“I feel like I am a role model which helps tackling misconceptions by some people that being in a wheelchair means that I am incapable of achieving any success in life. I used my opportunity as a registration officer to show people in the communities where we were based that I am just as capable as everyone else,” he says. “In fact, during my lunchbreaks when we were registering the people, some of the community members would try to get me to go back and help the rest of the team because I was the fastest in using the biometric registration kit to record their information.”
The Sustainable Development Goals, a roadmap for global prosperity and development, were adopted by all UN Member States in 2015. Within that blueprint, Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16, Target 9 reiterates the centrality of identity and calls for countries to “provide legal identity for all, including birth registration, by 2030”. To bolster this call, the UN Legal Identity Agenda Task Force (UNLIA TF) was established in September 2018, comprising of 13 UN agencies, under the chairmanship of UNDP, UNICEF and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. The Task Force is working together to try to assist Member States to achieve SDG Target 16.9.
© 2026 United Nations Development Programme
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