Let's Talk About Digital Identity with Grace Mutung'u, internet policy advocate and research fellow at CIPIT. This week, Oscar chats to Grace Mutung'u about challenges for digital identity in Kenya and the various considerations for inclusive national identification, including historical, social and economic issues. She fills us in on the court case against Huduma Namba (Kenya's national ID platform) that she has been involved in and its recent judgement to rule out unnecessary DNA and GPS data collection, and the framework that must be in place before being fully rolled out.

[Scroll down for transcript] "We need to think about identities before thinking about applications of digital technologies." Grace is a research fellow at the Centre for IP and IT Law (CIPIT) at Strathmore University, studying digital ID and society in Kenya. She has been involved in ICT policy advocacy for over 10 years and was most recently providing support during litigation in Kenya's digital ID case.

Find Grace on Twitter @bomu.

Find out more about the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law (CIPIT) - a think tank and training centre established under Strathmore Law School at cipit.org.

We’ll be continuing this conversation on Twitter using #LTADI – join us @ubisecure!

[Podcast transcript] [Intro] Let’s Talk About Digital Identity, the podcast connecting identity and business. I am your host Oscar Santolalla.

Oscar Santolalla: Hello and thanks for joining today. Today we’ll hear for the first time how is digital identity in the African continent. So, for that we have a special guest who is Grace Mutung’u. Grace is a research fellow at the Centre for IP and IT Law at Strathmore University in Nairobi studying digital identity and society in Kenya. She has been involved in ICT policy advocacy for over 10 years and was most recently providing support during litigation in Kenya’s digital ID case.

Hello Grace.

Grace Mutung’u: Hi, Oscar. Thanks for having me.

Oscar: It’s a pleasure. I’m happy to have you today on the show. So the first thing I would like to hear from you is how you entered in the world of digital identity? What was your journey?

Grace: I just kind of stumbled upon it. I have been working in ICT policy work here in Kenya. And in 2017, we had the general elections and - something about Kenya is that people take their politics very seriously. For us in the ICT space we were observing use of technology in the elections. And we observed that there was a lot of use of digital identity from two spaces.

One is that the politicians were using identity data from the voters register to target voters, to vote for them. And then at the same time there was also use of social media for political discourse for political mobilisation. And later on, the news came out that one of the political parties had actually engaged the firm Cambridge Analytica for voter targeting and some sort of political manipulation. So after that we really got into the work of advocating for our rights based digital identity for data protection and for political accountability for use of digital identity data.

Oscar: And what would you say are today the main challenges in digital identity that Kenya is facing?

Grace: I’d say one big challenge is that there has been a lot of importation of ideas, technology and hardware. So for example, Kenya is one of the countries in Africa that has always had a legal identity. In Kenya, it’s the normal thing to walk around with a card, a national identity card. It’s very normal to be asked for your card in order to access a building. This just started from a long time ago during the colonial period and then over time it’s become normalised because of the security challenges that we’ve had, the terrorism issues that we’ve had, so it’s very normal to walk around with the paper identity.

But there have been a lot of problems with the paper identity because that iden...