Hatupangwingwi: The story how Kenyans fought back against intrusive digital identity systems

The session title is fashioned after the Kenyan movement building rhetoric “Hatupangwingwi” which is Kenyan slang meant as a call to action to counter anti-movement building techniques by the political class and resist infiltration and corruption. This is true for the organisation and movement building towards inclusive identity regimes in Kenya. The session seeks to explore the lessons from Kenya’s journey to digitalization of public services and the uptake of Digital Public infrastructure. It digs deeper on the power of us and how civil society could stop a destructive surveillance driven digitalisation thus protecting millions of Kenyans. In 2019, the Kenyan government announced the transition to a centralised database named National integrated Identity management system (Huduma Namba) in a bid to develop a digital Identity system that went on to be termed a “single source of truth. Historically, Kenya has not had the best track record with civil registration and identity systems.