Project Profile, an investigation published by The Elephant media outlet, examines double-registered people in Kenya who are caught between Kenya’s national registration and the Profile Global Registration System (proGres), a tool developed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for managing refugee registration and case management.
When U.N. officials came to northeastern Kenya to offer food aid, education, and medical services to refugees, some residents registered themselves as refugees to get what their government was not offering them. However, the double-registered persons became de facto stateless after the UNHCR gave the Kenyan government access to its proGres database in April 2016.
When a Kenyan citizen reaches the age of 18 and applies for an identification card as required by law, authorities capture their fingerprints and check them against the Automated Identification System. According to sources, fingerprints may be queried against the proGres records. If the fingerprints are also found in refugee records, the ID application may be flagged and subsequently rejected or denied.
In this reporting project, journalist Naipanoi Lepapa investigates the harms of deploying biometric recognition technology in the humanitarian aid sector and how the UNHCR deployed biometrics in Kenya in partnership with the private sector.
Caption: National Kenyan and refugee ID cards. Image by Naipanoi Lepapa.
