Why we must continue advocating for human rights-based digital systems

Uganda adopted the use of a national digital ID system in 2014.

I remember standing in long queues several times and eventually giving up, as I was running a family business at the tail end of my Senior Six vacation before I joined law school. This was the experience of many Ugandans— until recently, thanks to NIRA’s new online pre-registration platform.

A year later, I encountered my first law-making process with the enactment of legislation regulating the registration of persons, now known as the Registration of Persons Act. The registration process continued until 2019, five years later, when one of the key laws regulating the collection, storage and processing of personal data was enacted: the Data Protection and Privacy Act, Cap. 97.

You might ask where the problem lies. Some argue that the law usually catches up with technology. But here is where we drop the ball, especially when it comes to digital public infrastructure like national IDs.

While such infrastructure can make access to public and private services seamless, if it is not backed by a sound legal framework and fails to adopt a human rights-based approach in its design, implementation and evaluation, it becomes a recipe for disaster fuelling exclusion and unjustifiable limitations on the enjoyment of rights and freedoms.

For instance, it was problematic to implement the digital ID system before enacting a comprehensive legal and data protection framework. The system involves collecting vast amounts of personal data (after the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, NIRA likely holds the largest database).

Yet issues around data subject rights, data storage and security, and legal redress for violations were not adequately addressed. This is why Kenya’s first digital ID system faced legal challenges.

Thank God, Uganda’s public interest litigation system is now caged. Even after implementing the ID system, issues of exclusion emerged, driven by two factors: the mandatory requirement of a national ID to access public and private services, and the system’s accessibility challenges.

While the SDGs adopted in 2015, particularly SDG target 16.9 which calls for legal identity for all, including birth registration, NIRA reported (as of October 15, 2025) that only 27.4 million out of 45.9 million Ugandans were registered in its database. This means a significant portion of the population is excluded from services that require a national ID.

The exclusion becomes even more troubling for vulnerable groups — such as the elderly, persons with disabilities, and stateless communities — who face systemic and policy-level barriers to accessing registration services.

As a result, they are locked out of key services and opportunities. A recent example from India illustrates the stakes. The Indian courts struck down e-KYC regulations after they were found to exclude people with facial impairments and acid attack survivors, who couldn’t access financial and telecom services due to the eKYC requirements embedded in the design customer on boarding systems.

This ruling highlighted the very real but often overlooked accessibility challenges that vulnerable groups face in digital systems. In Uganda, similar issues persist. Some senior citizens have missed out on Social Assistance Grants for Empowerment (SAGE).

Stateless communities have also been denied employment opportunities since a national ID is the required gate pass to both public and private sectors. The ongoing mass enrolment and ID renewal efforts are a step in the right direction.

But beyond that, we must be deliberate in ensuring that the system does not entrench existing inequalities or exclusions. We need to adopt a human rights-based approach in the design, implementation, and continuous evaluation of the ID system’s compliance with both national and international human rights standards.

Above all, we must eliminate all barriers to access, whether they are rooted in policy, logistics, or system design.

morganapollo22@gmail.com

The writer is a digital rights lawyer, and head of Programs, Health Equity and Policy Initiative