AFRICA SEMINAR: CERTIFICATIONS OF CITIZENSHIP IN AFRICA (CERTIZENS): FOCUS ON GHANA AND UGANDA

From passports to voter registration, accessing healthcare or getting a SIM card, ID documents are indispensable to everyday life. On the African continent, the number of people living without legal ID documents make up 50% of the estimated one billion people living worldwide without formal proof of identity. This is garnering increased attention both globally and nationally, not least through the Sustainable Development Goal 16.9, ‘legal identity for all’ by 2030, through a range of national registration reforms, and through the intensified promotion of digital ID ‘solutions’. Yet there is far more at stake, and a more complex and uneven set of implications, resulting from these shifts in focus and practice across the continent. With in-depth studies in Ghana and Uganda by a combination of nine researchers, CERTIZENS critically addresses the multiple, inter-related dimensions and differentiated effects of past and present systems of citizen/ship classification, certification and identification. In this seminar, two of the senior researchers within the CERTIZENS Project present their current work.

DR. KOJO OPOKU AIDOO, University of Ghana Legon, Accra
One State, Many Citizens Identification Systems: Ghana Civic and Ethnic Citizenship Identifications

DR. GODFREY ASIIMWE, Makerere University, Kampala
Post-Independence Citizen Certification Regimes and their Impact on Banyarwanda in Uganda

The seminar will be hosted by Amanda Hammar, Professor of African Studies at the Centre of Africa Studies, and Principal Investigator of the CERTIZENS Project