Civil registration cannot be reduced to a simple counter that issues certificates. It is the legal foundation of a person's existence, the authentic memory of the nation, and one of the state's most decisive, if often unseen, sovereign functions. Being recognised, identified and legally recorded within the national community is among every person's most fundamental aspirations. Any failure in civil registration therefore reaches far beyond administration: it can jeopardise proof of identity, determination of nationality, access to education and social protection, freedom of movement, inheritance and, more fundamentally, the full enjoyment of the rights attached to personhood and citizenship.
Securing the documentary chain
Senegal is clearly not starting from scratch. The NEKKAL programme, supported by the European Union and implemented notably with Enabel, followed by the rollout of the Civil Registration Management Software (LGEC), has set a process in motion that must now be made irreversible. According to data consolidated as of 17 July 2026 and published by the National Civil Registration Agency (ANEC), the LGEC had been deployed in 437 of 629 civil registration centres, or about 69.5% (rounded by ANEC to 70%). The system had recorded 15,359,558 entries. The task is no longer to experiment with digital transformation, but to complete it, extend it across the country and secure the system as a whole.
Yet it is precisely within the integrity of this documentary and legal chain that one of the deepest vulnerabilities of our civil registration system lies. The problem stems not only from the age of some registers or from handwritten entries that are sometimes difficult to decipher. It also results from a silent accumulation of weaknesses: failures to declare births, transcription errors, alterations, duplicate records, discrepancies between records, deterioration of physical documents, and inadequate traceability. Their effects, long imperceptible, may resurface decades later with significant administrative and legal consequences. In civil registration, an irregularity that seems minor at first can gradually compromise the continuity of legal identity and cascade through all the procedures that depend on it. A documentary anomaly then ceases to be a mere material defect and becomes a serious threat to a person’s identity, potentially affecting the exercise of their rights for years to come.
Verifying source data
The recent initiative by the Ministry of the Interior, under the authority of Mouhamadou Makhtar Cissé, deserves recognition because it places the reliability of source data at the centre of the identification system. The requirement to accompany a birth certificate extract with a full literal copy, as part of the operation to renew ECOWAS biometric national identity cards, is particularly relevant. It should become a lasting feature of verification procedures whenever the legal security of a person’s identity requires it.
The full literal copy should not be treated as a superfluous document. It is a key instrument for matching, checking and safeguarding records, as it makes it possible to trace the original contents of an entry and test their consistency. In civil registration, administrative sentiment must not prevail over the requirement for legal accuracy: a person’s identity demands rigour, impartiality, traceability and precision. The aim is neither to make procedures needlessly difficult for users nor to multiply formalities, but to prevent discrepancies before they spread through the documentary chain. No biometric architecture, however sophisticated, can make downstream systems reliable for long if the source data remain uncertain. Biometrics can secure the individual only if civil registration has first secured the legal identity associated with that person.
Reforming the institutional and legal framework
A systemic reform is therefore essential, beginning with a national programme to clean, verify and fully digitise the civil registration archives. Every register held by municipalities, secondary centres and diplomatic and consular posts should be inventoried, digitised, indexed, checked and backed up within a secure architecture. Digitisation must not mean photographing disorder or reproducing its flaws electronically: records must first be cleaned, assessed and certified before they are preserved in digital form.
At the same time, the legal framework should be reviewed. Law No. 2013-10 of 28 December 2013 on the General Code of Local Authorities, together with the provisions of the Family Code governing civil registration, should be reconsidered in light of digital transformation, interoperability and new data-governance requirements. The review should clarify responsibilities, transmission procedures, oversight, electronic archiving and coordination between the State and local authorities.
This reform should, in particular, establish regional civil registration centres. As technical intermediaries between the central administration and local centres, they would oversee quality control, provide technical support, supervise operations, deliver training, conduct audits, report anomalies and monitor performance indicators. Each regional centre should be led by a professional specifically trained in civil registration, the Family Code, data protection and public management, and supported by staff who are qualified, regularly trained, supervised and aware of the sovereign importance of their work.
The transition away from an entirely handwritten system should also be accelerated. New registers should be created directly within a secure digital environment, with changes tracked, staff authenticated and redundant backups maintained. Given the risks of overwriting, illegibility and error, handwriting should no longer be the standard way to maintain a national identity system in the twenty-first century.
Connecting services and protecting data
Modernisation also requires breaking down the silos that still separate health services, civil registration, justice, local authorities, national identification and consular services, even though they form parts of a single identity chain. A birth recorded at a maternity unit or other health facility should therefore trigger an almost immediate, secure digital notification to the civil registrar with territorial jurisdiction. This would allow biological existence to receive legal recognition without interruption, through clear coordination between health notification and civil registration in accordance with applicable rules. In time, each duly validated registration should generate consistent extracts and full literal copies and link them to the national identification number, with full respect for applicable law and personal data protection.
This architecture should also include a national toll-free number, a single portal for reporting anomalies, regional support units, alerts for uncompleted declarations, territory-level performance dashboards and periodic audits. An Observatory for Civil Registration Quality (OQEC) could publish annual figures on registration rates, processing times, corrections, litigation and regional disparities. These data would help guide the system, including before registers are closed under the procedures set out by law.
Making human resources a pillar of reform
Technology alone will never be enough without investment in people. A civil registrar or registration officer is not a mere transcriber: they safeguard a part of the nation’s legal identity. Their training, accountability and professional ethics must therefore be central to any systemic reform.
Building on the New Deal for Technology and Senegal Vision 2050, Senegal is at a strategic and historic turning point. It must move beyond digitising documents and establish genuine sovereignty over legal identity, grounded in data integrity, interoperable systems, traceable operations and lasting archives. An administration’s digital maturity is no longer measured only by how quickly it issues a certificate, but by its institutional ability to preserve the authenticity, uniqueness and legal continuity of identity over time, through modern, responsible and results-oriented public management. The ultimate ambition should be that a birth registered today remains, fifty years from now, legally certain, digitally secure, technically traceable and administratively incontestable, subject to corrections authorised by law.
Mouhamadou Rassoul Lahi Diop
Expert in public administration, public policy monitoring and evaluation, and governance
Civil Registration Officer, Ottawa (Canada)
This contribution is published in the author’s personal capacity. The views and proposals expressed are solely those of the author.
References
- ANEC, LGEC deployment status as of 18 July 2026 (published 29 July 2026).
- Senegalese Prime Minister’s Office, interministerial meeting on civil registration, 18 March 2025.
- Consulate General of Senegal in Paris, documents required to renew national identity cards, 28 September 2026.
- Senegalese Ministry of Justice, Family Code.