The Gender Equality Mirage: From Human Bias to AI Bias in Digital ID Systems in Africa

Digital ID systems refer to systems that use digital technologies to capture, validate, store, transfer, identify and authenticate data of people. With the revolutionary transformation in the digital landscape, African countries such as Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt have adopted the use of digital ID systems. Approximately 500 million people in Africa are living without any form of legal identification such as a birth certificate or national ID. Therefore, digital ID systems have increasingly become famous because of their relative ease, convenience and low cost compared to analogue ID systems. More fundamentally, a digital ID system may employ AI within the system’s functions or be related to AI systems that leverage its data. In 2018, Ghana launched BACE API, an application programming interface that uses AI-enhanced facial recognition technology to help identify individuals in digital ID systems. The intention of this technology was to improve the design of facial recognition software in Africa as facial recognition software has recently become an important tool in digital ID systems...