In an address from the briefing room of the Office of the Prime Minister on April 17, 2024, Minister Dana Dixon-Morris described Jamaica’s new national identity card (NIDS) as “voluntary, voluntary, voluntary—no one will be forced to have this ID.” The impromptu appearance was prompted by a new round of misinformation about NIDS spreading rapidly via social media. This wasn’t the first time the Andrew Holdness-led government of Jamaica has had to broadcast this message. It likely won’t be the last.
Digital transformation moves at the speed of trust—a phrase we’ve adapted from Steve Covey’s work on trust and change processes. In a Caribbean region broadly characterized as low trust, what is needed to unlock the public’s support for efforts to transition countries to what a 2024 UNDP report described as “digital societies” or “small island digital states”?
Multiple efforts to advance this goal have been stymied by underappreciation and underinvestment in the practices needed to bridge the trust gap. Mobile money projects in Jamaica and Haiti have struggled to gain traction. New digital authentication features of Barbados’s digital national ID were delayed after privacy concerns. Without public trust, digital transformation efforts will struggle to achieve the population-scale adoption that the governments and private actors pursuing them desire.
Jamaica’s identification problem
Jamaica has an identification problem. Despite successive governments since the 1970s articulating Jamaica’s need for a foundational identification card—one available to every resident or national—no such option yet exists. Jamaicans have relied on one of several functional identity options (a driver’s license, voter ID, or passport) for their day-to-day needs. However, none of these options is fully trusted across the Jamaican ecosystem, with many service providers requiring multiple identity documents or character references for actions like opening a bank account or accessing government services.
Among the various identification options, the passport is most widely used, but only 56% of adults own one. It is estimated that 10% of Jamaican adults have no formal identification, severely limiting their ability to take advantage of social benefits or participate in the formal economy.
A flawed response undermines the public trust
In 2016, the newly elected Andrew Holness government identified establishing a new national digital ID card as a priority project for transforming Jamaica into a digital society. The proposed national identification system would address Jamaica’s identification problems by creating a general-purpose ID available to every Jamaican citizen and legal resident. Unfortunately, the 2017 legislation that aimed to accomplish this, the National Identification and Registration Act (NIRA), had several attributes that the public and the parliamentary opposition found disconcerting. Rather than engaging the various constituents in dialogue, Holness’s government prioritised an external Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) funding deadline that left minimal space for debate and consultation.
Misinformation, concern, and criticism were rampant on the radio airwaves and social media throughout the bill’s debate in parliament. Using its majority in both houses, the government passed NIRA 2017 into law in one of Jamaica’s longest parliamentary sessions, meeting the IDB deadline. Dissatisfied with the outcome, the opposition, the People’s National Party, successfully challenged the law before the Supreme Court of Jamaica. NIRA 2017 was declared unconstitutional by Chief Justice Bryan Sykes, primarily due to its mandatory enrollment requirements: failure to enroll for the ID would have been a criminal offence. It was an embarrassing defeat for the prime minister, who had personally championed the initiative.
Many Jamaicans felt that the 2019 Supreme Court of Jamaica ruling validated their concerns, which included NIRA’s mandatory enrollment, lack of independent oversight, and extensive data collection. The government earned additional public criticism for rushing through the legislation without adequate public education and consultation. In the aftermath of the court’s decision, the prime minister vowed to revise the law, pass comprehensive data protection legislation, and incorporate public input in the next version of the bill.
A revised NIRA bill was tabled in parliament in December 2020, and a Joint Select Committee (JSC) was convened to facilitate structured public input on the draft. The JSC received more than 102 written submissions, and specific contributors were invited to present their concerns to the JSC and have them debated publicly. The JSC call for public comment resulted in multiple important changes to the NIRA bill. These included introducing a requirement for the proposed National Identification Registration Authority, the new institution responsible for managing NIDS, to comply with Jamaica’s recently passed Data Protection Act from its inception. Additionally, some clarification was given to the discretionary powers that the bill granted NIRA to deny an applicant based on the data they provided. However, important concerns also remained unaddressed. The most critical was the government’s rejection of calls to include provisions that explicitly safeguarded against NIDS becoming, in practice, mandatory to access services.
NIDS’s future and trust-building as an ongoing process
In many ways, the NIDS JSC process could be considered a success for the Jamaican government. It was widely covered in the media and received significant public engagement through written submissions and general commentary. The formal parliamentary sessions were also accompanied by a series of townhalls that were well attended, though some stakeholders criticised them as channels for government advocacy rather than genuine “listening” exercises. But digital projects do not exist in a vacuum, and significant obstacles remain.
According to an OECD study, Jamaicans’ confidence in their government stood at 32% in 2022, below average for Latin America and the Caribbean. A 2021 UNDP paper found that widespread distrust in public institutions contributed to 60% of the labor force engaging in informal economic activity. It is therefore unsurprising that in 2024, misinformation and fear about the NIDS project gained momentum on social media so quickly. Building confidence and securing the adoption of a new digital ID in this environment will require intentional trust-building—not as a one-off exercise, but a continuous process. This also appears to be at the top of the government’s mind. In the second half of 2024, the Jamaican government invited the public to support testing the NIDS enrollment process through a voluntary pilot. The response exceeded the pilot’s modest target of 300 persons. More engagements like this will be critical for NIDS’s success.
Solving the identity problem is critical for advancing Jamaica’s development. But so is rebuilding trust in our institutions. The digital ID project stands at the intersection of these concerns.