African Countries Are Struggling To Build Robust Identity Systems (economist.com) 72
The first thing that visitors to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg see is a wall of identity cards-- the pieces of paper that determined where people could live and work and whom they could love. From the outset, the apartheid regime's ability to discriminate against "nie-blankes" (non-whites) depended on having a robust system of identifying people. The opposite problem confronts most other countries in Africa today. Governments have little idea who their citizens are [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: African countries struggle for several reasons. One is racial discrimination. Uganda, Liberia and Sierra Leone explicitly withhold nationality from children of certain races and ethnicities. Other countries do so informally by refusing to issue papers. Another reason is a failure by governments to explain to their citizens how they might benefit. Consider birth registration, the most basic form of official identity. South Asia more than doubled its rate of birth registration to 71% between 2000 and 2014. In sub-Saharan Africa the rate dropped by one point, to 41%, over the same period. For poor villagers, going to a government office to register a birth is time-consuming and expensive, especially when officials demand bribes. Some countries charge a fee, which is a disincentive. Others penalize late registrations.
One way to encourage people is to link birth registration to benefits such as child-support grants -- something South Africa did with great success. But that approach may also have the perverse consequence of denying payments to the very poorest. Money is another reason many African countries have fallen behind their peers. Extending the state's reach to remote areas can be expensive. So, too, is paying for skilled labour of the sort required to fill in forms accurately and to operate biometric machines. The technology itself is costly, especially for small countries that do not have much buying power.
One way to encourage people is to link birth registration to benefits such as child-support grants -- something South Africa did with great success. But that approach may also have the perverse consequence of denying payments to the very poorest. Money is another reason many African countries have fallen behind their peers. Extending the state's reach to remote areas can be expensive. So, too, is paying for skilled labour of the sort required to fill in forms accurately and to operate biometric machines. The technology itself is costly, especially for small countries that do not have much buying power.
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terminology for that has been standard from both "sides", theist and atheist
Except for atheists the term "god" and "imaginary friend" are equivalent and interchangeable.
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And the terminology for that has been standard from both "sides", theist and atheist
there are no sides, just people making stuff up about deities, crazy nuts stuff, but apparently it is "sides" what it is a all about ...
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It is impossible for a view held by the majority of one's culture to be a "delusion", per the DSM, the core reference of actual professionals in the field you're poseuring to be relevant to.
The view could be wrong. It cannot be a "delusion". The only ones harboring that delusion are you, and, say, Dawkins.
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Outside of the 2.2 billion people who agree with me? I can live with that.
I can't fix all of your terminology, that would require me to fix your entire brain to become rational. But, no, 2.2 billion people is not a "cult".
Evidence, including peer-reviewed evidence, is a google away. If you choose to remain willfully ignorant, that's on you.
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Your assertion of it being a "cult" is both unbacked and meaningless.
The stranger thing though is that you think your opinion on this could possibly matter. It couldn't. You're Random Guy On Internet, and your worldview itself allows for you having no more significance than that.
You'll troll awhile, evolution will eliminate you, the end. Nice and neat, and thoroughly asked for.
Re: They should go to Israel (Score:2)
Outside of the 2.2 billion people who agree with me? I can live with that.
The more idiots in the echo chamber, the greater the likelihood that they're all a bunch of morons.
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It is impossible for a view held by the majority of one's culture to be a "delusion"
Great, let's get enough crazies to vote and make the Earth flat. How many more do we need?
Skilled Labor (Score:4, Insightful)
paying for skilled labour of the sort required to fill in forms accurately
The problem is that a person who can fill out forms properly is considered "skilled labor". What kind of nation would that turn out to be? A nation of of people we would call "very unskilled" in the west.
Overestimating the US (Score:2)
I think you're vastly over rating the education level of Americans (the US). The US government doesn't put out the numbers (because they're embarrassingly bad), but most groups put the literacy rate at somewhere around 80%. So somebody who can fill out forms properly in the US would indeed be "skilled"
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Very plausible. (Score:2)
"Four in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences—literacy skills at level 2 or above in PIAAC (OECD 2013). In contrast, one in five U.S. adults (21 percent) has difficulty completing these tasks"
The rich/poor educated/uneducated divide in the US is so large and so massive, that many people don't even know how "the other h
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The rich/poor educated/uneducated divide in the US is so large and so massive, that many people don't even know how "the other half" lives.
And I'm still stuck dealing with the consequences of sharing the same voting districts as people who struggle to read.
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Prior to 1979, education was entirely funded and handled by the States. Now the States pander to the Federal for giant education funding checks.
The only way a voter can be even further disenfranchised is to adopt a Global Department of Education.
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It's just because they aren't used to doing it. Like when email was new in the West and people would treat it like writing a letter, with their physical address, date and "Dear Sir or Madam" at the top.
If people aren't used to filling out forms and providing personal information they can make mistakes, like not consistently spelling their name the same way or something. Since these forms are designed to be processed by software stuff like spelling can matter a lot.
Given time it will resolve itself but for n
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African countries struggle for several reasons. One is racial discrimination.
If you're Tswana you don't want to identify yourself as such to Zulu, if you're Zulu you don't point this out to Sotho, and if you're anything you don't mix with the Nigerians. Any kind of documents identifying yourself as anything other than the currently-in-power tribal/ethnic majority can lead to death, and often very gruesom
Identity management is hard (Score:4, Insightful)
It's funny that identity management is hard, because it's so basic to Western Civilization. But it's actually unbelievably difficult, especially when you're starting from scratch.
First, how do you identify a child, really? How do you disambiguate one child from another? And how do you certify that identity? Who does it?
The West has a mostly working chain-of-trust, from healthcare workers, county records, etc the was built up over centuries of practice. And it actually fails occasionally; there are midwives in Texas who were falsely certifying that kids born in Mexico were born in the US, which is causing all kinds of problems.
To be done well, the registration needs to happen automatically whenever a birth occurs, and there needs to be that chain of identity through time. People will try to cheat; a mom will forget the identity documents for child A and use the docs for child B for child A. Someone will try to get child C the benefits meant for child D. etc etc.
It would be an interesting problem to solve.
Really, the best identity document at this point is probably the cellphone. It doesn't guarantee uniqueness, but it's close.
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A cellphone as an identity document???? Um, what about footprint/fingerprints or DNA?
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And why do you care?
Yes, if the government is busy handing out money to all and sundry, it might be important. But I don't see governments that can't handle citizen ID's being wealthy enough to be handing out money to all and sundry....
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Because he thinks it's based on trust ... so once trust breaks down you get a government which can't handle citizen ID and which won't be wealthy.
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And why do you care?
Yes, if the government is busy handing out money to all and sundry, it might be important. But I don't see governments that can't handle citizen ID's being wealthy enough to be handing out money to all and sundry....
The need to identify people goes well beyond a desire to hand out money. Think of law enforcement problems on not being able to identify people. Is the person before the court the same person that committed the crime? Or worse, is the person that was convicted and in prison, or put to death, the person that committed the crime?
There's going to be difficulty in having commerce beyond a barter system if people can't be identified to hold up their end of a contract, or open a bank account, or hold a license
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a means to raise taxes, and therefore create an economy
Raising taxes generally destroys an economy. Governments are better off keeping taxes the same or lowering them and allowing economic growth to grant them a bigger revenue every year. Raising taxes is short sighted and amounts to government not caring about a bigger slice of pie next year but choosing more pie now. As a result next year's pie is smaller. It's also a proven rule of taxation that the more you tax, the less you actually get because people become more motivated to hide their money.
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Raising taxes generally destroys an economy. Governments are better off keeping taxes the same or lowering them and allowing economic growth to grant them a bigger revenue every year.
By "raise taxes" I meant having any taxation at all.
Taxes are necessary to have a government. I will agree that there is a point where taxes can be too high and become more of a burden than a benefit. What happens without a means to ID people the taxation becomes difficult to enforce, easy to evade, prone to bribery and fraud, and with this comes a government that will inevitably lose the faith and support of the people. If the government cannot function then this has a detrimental effect on the economy
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Please take your blind right-wingnut talking points elsewhere.
Yet, it is possible to destroy an economy if taxes are increased too much but:
1. No one really knows what "too much" is.
2. In the context of the GP post, you failed to understand the meaning of "raising taxes". Try taking some lessons on comprehension.
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To raise taxes means to levy or collect tax. At all. There is also a more literal sense of increasing tax revenue, but I'm pretty sure that's not what the grandparent was talking about.
But more importantly, remember that government taxes don't take anything from the pie. Tax money does not disappear. Whether more or less tax is collected, all of it is spent to fund government services. So taxes, through public goods, are merely a tool of strategic redistribution.
As a result of redistribution the next year's
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raise taxes means to levy or collect tax
Funny I've always read it as to levy taxes not raise a tax, but fair enough.
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I dunno, ask the Democrats.
In the US, they seem to think any requirement to show form of identity/citizenship, EVEN if it will be generated for the public for FREE to be somehow disenfranchising citizens or is somehow racist.
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Indeed if you listen to many libertarians, much of the problem of the third world is that property rights are not uniformly enforced. Having an identity known to the government is a prerequisite to knowing who owns the property and them being able to enforce that claim in court...you know unless identity is based on how many people someone can buy off to say "yep, that's John Smith and this his his land."
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National borders are artificial fluf. Maybe in the West it is seen as a normal and intrinsic part of identity, but as you can see in other parts of the world things are much more fuzzy. There are communities of people who regularly cross borders without concern. Nomadic communities. There are borders drawn up due to wars without concern as to who is where with immediate families being divided. Communities of undesirable ethnicities, religions, or political views who may have been within a country's border
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A line on a map is not "artificial"... one side, citizenship. On the other side another nations citizen... unless gov paper work shows something different.
Re 'regularly cross borders without concer"... now they will have to show travel documents... like in any normal advanced nation..
Re 'Communities of undesirable ethnicities" is why most nations are so interested in looking after their own citizens and not illegal migrants.
Re 'officially considered non-citizens
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Undesirable ethnicities very often means locals who've been there for generations, but whom are rejected as citizens or full-class citizens because they're not of the right sort. Ie, look at Kashmir, Israel, Turkey, Myanmar, etc.
So you're fine if the US decides one day that you're a non-citizen because you voted for the wrong person or are in the wrong religion or someone incorrectly decided that you once talked to an ISIS recruiter? That sort of stuff happens in other countries.
Most of of what I mentione
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Re 'So you're fine if the US decides'.. that is for the people of the USA and their gov to work out for their own citizens... all part of been a nation and having citizenship...
Re " non-citizen because" . nations do that all the time for dual citizens and people who got granted citizenship...
What a nation gives to non citizens it c
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Just to clarify, in Kashmir, Turkey and Israel, the use-cases are quite different from your assertion.
In Kashmir, the Indian Government considers all Kashmiris as citizens, while some/many/most Kashmiris want either independence or to join Pakistan. In this use-case, the government is perfectly OK with them having their own regional identity, as long as it connects to Indianess at a national level, which is what happens w.r.t all other states in India.
In Turkey, the state wants the Kurds who live there to d
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The West has a mostly working chain-of-trust, from healthcare workers, county records, etc the was built up over centuries of practice. And it actually fails occasionally; there are midwives in Texas who were falsely certifying that kids born in Mexico were born in the US, which is causing all kinds of problems.
To be done well, the registration needs to happen automatically whenever a birth occurs, and there needs to be that chain of identity through time. People will try to cheat; a mom will forget the identity documents for child A and use the docs for child B for child A. Someone will try to get child C the benefits meant for child D. etc etc.
It would be an interesting problem to solve.
Prior to telecommunications, the airplane, and the fossil-fueled ocean-going vessel, identity management wasn't particularly difficult. If you were able to walk into the local county recorder's office, you were obviously a citizen, as long as you looked enough like the county recorder. The problem of identity is a consequence of modern mobility, of both people and information.
And there's no way for an unbreakably robust identity system not to be usable for evil. A workable system that can tolerate the fo
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First, how do you identify a child, really? How do you disambiguate one child from another? And how do you certify that identity? Who does it?
All you need is an official with a smartphone and you can collect a high resolution photo, fingerprint scans and 3D face scan. That's way more information than society has had up until a few decades ago. It doesn't mean the information is correct as such, but it does stop three different mothers from claiming it's their kid and get benefits. If it has a tangible benefit like child support (or a tax break) then most mothers will register their kids as soon as they're born so it's not that easy to switch pare
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If a nation has failed and cant? They go back with a new digital system and interview all citizens about everyone in the community.
Community by community...trusted citizens can quickly recall decades of local history...house to house..
Encrypted smartphone interviews and any old paper work gets converted to digital.. OCR...
Correct for spelling,
Not true (Score:1)
[Citation Needed] (Score:1)
Uganda, Liberia and Sierra Leone explicitly withhold nationality from children of certain races and ethnicities.
Psst, Idi Amin has been gone for 40 years, and Uganda's current citizenship laws don't appear to say anything about this.
https://immigration.go.ug/cont... [immigration.go.ug]
I've not tested the theory personally, though, so if someone can point me to where any Ugandan law says that, in writing, I'm all ears.
Seeing Like a State (Score:2)
Sounds like some African leaders need to read Seeing Like a State [wikipedia.org] by James Scott.
A quick summary: "For a state to exercise its power across a large population, it must simplify, codify, and and regularize local practices. This process of flattening, or of making local practice “legible,” is not without costs. In the past, states have quite literally missed the forest — with many different valuable products, including food, shelter, medicines, and clothing — for the trees, or timber,
Not limited to Africa (Score:4, Interesting)
Recently they are trying hard to get some biometric id card system called Aadhar (meaning proof). Borders are porous. There are trains between India and Nepal without any passport control.
That is why it was so pointless for America to maintain no fly list with Middle-Eastern names. They are spelled in so many different ways, and name is fluid, easy to acquire new names and identities.
Me clicking on the article: (Score:1)
Nigeria might be the worst (Score:2, Flamebait)
Robust ID systems (Score:1)
When they get it figured out ... (Score:2)
So, can I become an african then? (Score:2)
So in theory, I could go down to an african country, claim to be born there and aquire citizenship? That could open up some possibilities.. Or how would the burden of proof be?
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They would then list that person as a citizen to the gov when new digital database work is done.
Any hospital, medical, schooling, work, permits, gov/mil documents would then have to fit in around that citizens life..
If none, then more people in the community would have to be asked...
Same for any family...
Slowly every illegal migrant and non citizen is detected...
Nobody truste