SIGPTS — Chad Extends AI Biometric Deduplication to National Refugee IDs

Chad's Agence Nationale des Titres Sécurisés (ANATS) has run a national biometric population registry, the Système Intégré de Gestion de la Population et des Titres Sécurisés (SIGPTS), since 2020, built on an Idemia automated biometric identification system that screens each new enrolment against roughly 15 million existing records in about ten seconds to catch duplicate identities.
In February 2025, with World Bank funding and support from UNHCR and Chad's refugee agency CNARR, ANATS began enrolling refugees — most fleeing conflict in Sudan, the Central African Republic and Nigeria — in the national registry for the first time, issuing biometrically verified National Refugee Identification Numbers (NNIRs). Enrolment opened in N'Djamena and Abéché; by 1 May 2025 more than 4,000 refugees had received an NNIR, against a stated pilot-phase target of 7,000 and a longer-term goal of 25,000.
In March 2026, ANATS agreed to connect the biometric registry to other government systems, starting with the Ministry of Finance, Budget, Economy, Planning and International Cooperation, under the "Chad Connexion 2030" digital strategy, which aims to make the registry a single identity source for public and private services.
These figures come from the implementing partners and trade press, not an independent evaluation — no published third-party audit covers deduplication accuracy, refugee data-protection safeguards, or the claimed gains in access to healthcare, banking and phone registration. The pilot also reaches only a small share of the roughly 1.5 million refugees and asylum seekers UNHCR reports Chad hosts.

Read the full analysis: https://www.unhcr.org/blogs/now-i-belong-refugees-in-chad-receive-national-id-numbers/