The Ministry of education (MoE) and the National ID Programme jointly introduced a Digital ID system as the official student identification across all educational institutions in Ethiopia.
This initiative is seen as a “critical moment” in Ethiopia’s journey towards digitizing and modernizing the education sector.
Per the two institutions, one of the most prominent benefits of using the Student Digital ID in the educational domain is the establishment of a unified identity.
“This serves as a robust identity verification across all academic platforms, thereby reducing redundancy and fosters coherence among students’ academic profiles,” they said in a statement today.
To kickstart registration in 2023/2024, the institutions say they will both be executing comprehensive operations in educational institutions nationwide
The introduction of the digital ID comes after “successful pilot projects” conducted to register higher education students.
The system was “both efficient and effective”, according to the ministry of education.
Accordingly, over 640,000 student’s biometric data was migrated into the National ID Program’s system for Fayda ID generation.
The integration offers significant operational efficiency of Educational institutions, ranging from grade schools to universities.
They will be able “to streamline their approach in handling administrative responsibilities, particularly, admissions, examinations, and record management,” authorities say.
This will be further reflected in key engagements such as the Fayda based licensing and national examinations rollout, authorities say.
The MoE and the NID “are hopeful about the transformative capabilities of this endeavor” and urged all actors in the education sector “to fully embrace this innovative transition.”
Apart from the MoE, the central bank and the ministry of health have recently begun to leverage the national Digital ID system, named Fayda, to streamline operations and services in their respective sectors.
The NID is implementing a nation-wide biometric digital ID system called Fayda, aiming to register all eligible Ethiopians by the end of 2025.
