The National Identification Registry (NIR) has ended a two-day orientation workshop on how both public and private institutions in Liberia can access the Registry’s Biometric Verification Platform. The workshop also focused on benefits the institutions could accrue from the verification technology.
The Biometric Verification Platform, introduced in May this year, is designed to enable service providers in the public and private sectors to easily authenticate their clients, customers and anyone with whom they are transacting business.
The Orientation Workshop was held on November 12 & 13, 2019 at the NIR’s Head Offices in Congo Town, Monrovia and brought together nearly thirty participants from key government ministries and agencies, the banking sector and the two major mobile-phone service providers; Lonestar MTN and ORANGE-Liberia.
In his opening statement, Mr. Zeze Reed, Deputy Executive Director for Technical Services at the NIR, said the workshop was intended to introduce the Biometric Verification Platform to the participating institutions as “the most simple and reliable means to verify people interacting with your institutions.”
Mr. Reed said “duplication is all over the world” but as an agency of government responsible to issue the National Identification Card, it is also responsible to put in place the necessary technology to authenticate or verify bearers of the national identity.
At the end of the two-day workshop, the participants commended the government through the National Identification Registry for introducing the verification platform.
It can be recalled that the Liberia Telecommunications Authority (LTA) last week hosted a one-day Public Consultation on a draft regulation seeking to require all service providers to use government-issued identification cards as a precondition to issue mobile numbers to subscribers.
The LTA said the draft regulation is to “record and maintain personal information of mobile telecommunication subscribers in the Republic of Liberia and to establish, control, administer and protect databases of subscribers.” It is also intended to “verify the authenticity of the identity document being used during registration and to establish penalties for violations.”
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