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Good practice Imported

Houwiyeti — Mauritania's AI Facial-Biometric Digital ID for E-Government Access

Mauritania · Nouakchott · See the Mauritania profile · See the Nouakchott profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 51% 60/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Mauritania's Houwiyeti app authenticates citizens to e-government services via AI facial recognition instead of passwords, with offline verification for rural areas. Piloted in 2023 with 70+ staff, it rolled out nationally in August 2024; no uptake figures published since.

70+ employees
Staff who tested the app on the pilot's first day (22 March 2023)
Houwiyeti — Mauritania's AI Facial-Biometric Digital ID for E-Government Access

Details

Maturity
Scaling
Promoter
Ministry of Digital Transition, Innovation and Public Sector Modernisation (MTNIMA) / National Agency for People Registry and Secure Documents, with UNDP and TECH5/SmartMS
Period
2022-2024
Keywords
digital identity, e-government, biometrics

Context

Houwiyeti (“my identity” in Hassaniya Arabic) is a mobile digital-identity application that lets Mauritanian citizens authenticate to government e-services using AI-driven facial biometrics rather than usernames and passwords. The system performs liveness detection and 1:1 face matching against a citizen's registered ID photo, and was designed to work offline in low-connectivity rural areas.

Activities

The project was tendered in June 2022 by Mauritania's Ministry of Digital Transition, Innovation and Public Sector Modernisation (MTNIMA) together with the National Agency for People Registry and Secure Documents, with technical delivery by TECH5/SmartMS and funding support from UNDP. A pilot was demonstrated to MTNIMA staff on 22 March 2023, with more than 70 employees testing the app on its first day; the pilot ran through October 2023 before a national rollout launched in August 2024.

Conclusions

Evidence is currently descriptive rather than outcome-based: independent trade press (Biometric Update, Identity Week) and UNDP corroborate the tender, pilot and launch timeline, but no public figures on citizen enrolment, service-completion rates, fraud reduction or accuracy have been published since the August 2024 launch. The underlying TECH5 biometric-matching technology has been deployed for comparable identity systems in Nigeria (NIMC), Uganda (NIRA) and Peru (RENIEC), suggesting a transferable technical model even though Mauritania's own rollout has not yet been independently evaluated.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Medium (€50k–€500k)
Time to results
Medium (1–3 years) — Tendered June 2022; pilot demonstrated March 2023 with 70+ staff testers; pilot ran through October 2023; national rollout launched August 2024.
Staffing & skills
Ministry of Digital Transition, Innovation and Public Sector Modernisation (MTNIMA) and the National Agency for People Registry and Secure Documents, TECH5/SmartMS providing technical delivery, UNDP providing funding support

Conditions for success

  • Offline verification designed to work in low-connectivity rural areas
  • Liveness detection and 1:1 face matching against the registered ID photo to prevent spoofing

Common failure modes

  • No public uptake, accuracy or fraud-reduction figures have been published since the August 2024 national launch

Commonly funded by

Digital Europe Programme National / regional programmes

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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