Samoa: two weeks to lay the foundation of the national digital ID

Two weeks in Samoa for the inception mission of the National Digital Identification System, alongside the Samoa Bureau of Statistics and with support from the World Bank.

The workplan is agreed with our joint venture partner KVAConsult. The alignment workshop is done. The direction is set: a foundational ID as the first building block of Samoa’s digital public infrastructure.

That choice matters more than it sounds. Get the foundation right and social protection, financial inclusion and service delivery all get easier. Get it wrong and every layer above pays for it, for a decade.

What I will remember from these two weeks is the ecosystem. Complex, balanced, and very closely connected. That is not an obstacle to a national programme. It is the thing that will carry it.

The digital transformation has 42 months to run. The first sprint starts.

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