THE National Identification Authority (NIDA) has so far registered 24,495,804 people, since registration and recognition process started in 2012.

Addressing journalists in Dar es Salaam recently, Geoffrey Tengeneza, NIDA head of communication unit said that the number of people registered is equivalent to 79 percent of the people aged 18 and above.

Tengeneza said that NIDA linked 96 public and private institutions and three institutions in Zanzibar through data sharing from data centres to ease access to information on individuals and serve the public easily.

 “Individuals who qualified for registration were 31,477,938 people according to the 2022 census where 79 percent were registered and eligible to get national identification cards,” he said.

“We successfully issued national identification numbers (NIN) to 20,832,225 people, which makes 85 percent of people who have been recognised and registered. The authority also managed to produce 20,286,420 ID cards which is 97.4 percent of people in possession of NIN,” he said

Tengeneza said that the authority alleviated the problem of availability and access to NIDA cards by members of the public, which he admitted was a long-standing challenge.

“We all bear witness how the public used to complain about the unavailability of the cards which impeded their access to various social services. We have managed to completely address this problem by ensuring we produce and issue the cards to all people who registered and have NIN,” he said.

“As an authority, we planned to ensure the shortage of NIDA cards is addressed completely before the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar through employment of two strategies: mass production of NIDA IDs and mass distribution and issuance of the cards,” he added.

According to him, NIDA has equipped its staff with expertise to create and produce the cards to save cost as well as save time needed to address technical problems encountered during the production phase.

“Development of internal technical capacity allowed us to get rid of depending on foreign contractors to come and solve our problems. Fortunately, we can now do everything. In this sector, we have empowered our experts to learn how to improve our systems and create an electronic register containing people’s information,” he said.