Digital Identification for Poverty Alleviation in Malawi: Pilot Study

The National Registration Bureau (NRB) achieved near-universal registration of adults over the age of 16 by the middle of 2018. However, there are ongoing challenges related to the registration of newly eligible individuals. Moreover, many technical and policy questions remain about how to link the new unique IDs to the records and operations of the more than 30 agencies involved in the country’s anti-poverty programs. Our pilot work will develop a strong partnership with NRB and build technical capacity to incorporate ID numbers in the data collected by the government agencies involved in anti-poverty programming, which will make large-scale evaluations with outcomes based on administrative data possible in the future.