The World Bank approved $273 million in International Development Association (IDA) financing for Togo, Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger to facilitate access to services for millions of people, especially women and the poorest segments of society through the West Africa Unique Identification for Regional Integration and Inclusion (WURI) Programme.
The West Africa Unique Identification for Regional Integration and Inclusion Programme will help build the foundational identification systems that are inclusive of all persons in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) territory, irrespective of nationality, citizenship or legal status. The Programme will help improve access to services, including safety nets, social registries, health and pension programs, financial and digital inclusion, women and girls’ empowerment, and labor mobility.
”The WURI Programme will help countries to reap substantial benefits at both regional and national levels. Foundational digital identification systems can play an important role in delivering and managing social protection, health and financial inclusion services and are more important than ever in times such as we are experiencing with COVID 19,” says Deborah Wetzel, World Bank Director of Regional Integration for Africa. “WURI will support service delivery in the ECOWAS community by opening-up access to unique identification for all persons in the territory and promoting cross-border responses by linking national systems,” she added.
This financing is the second phase of the WURI Programme bringing in Togo, Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger, and covers approximately 65 million people. Each country will implement foundational identification systems independently and according to their needs, using a minimal set of attributes to uniquely describe an individual.
”In the wake of the COVID 19 crisis, identifying and providing social protection to those employed in the informal sector, who are not covered by any program but are vulnerable and may slip into poverty, has become more critical than ever. The WURI programme can support social insurance systems for the informal sector, that are interoperable with social registries and build regionally on foundational identification platforms,” says Dena Ringold, World Bank, Africa Regional Director for Human Development.
The $395.1 million West Africa Unique Identification for Regional Integration and Inclusion Programme, which started in 2018 with Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea, is important to help achieve human development goals in participating countries. The Program furthers the World Bank Group’s twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity, and directly supports the ECOWAS regional strategy 2019-2023, which aims to raise the living standards of the populations in its member countries.
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