The suspension of the residential identification card issuance service imposed by the Addis Abeba City Administration a year ago is partially lifted. The service is open for university students, patients looking to go abroad for medical treatment, public employees that formed cooperatives to build housing units and a workforce under law enforcement.

Headed by Yonas Alemayehu, a law graduate of Mekelle University, who took the leadership role in September 2022 after serving as a deputy director for almost a year, the Civil Registration & Residency Service Agency officials selected these specific segments based on the urgency of their situation.

They opted to wait for a system upgrade before resuming the service fully.

"We're worried the current system may not handle the anticipated crowd coming to get the service," said Yosef Nigussie, communications head at the Agency.

He recalls the ban on ID renewal service that was imposed three months following the suspension of applying for a new resident ID, which resulted in more than a quarter of million people seeking the service after it was resumed. Yosef said they are concentrating on digitizing their record keeping while upgrading the system to allow the collection of biometrics data.

The system was upgraded to register eight million fingerprints in 2018 from its previous capacity of two million.

The Agency has collected 12.6 million Br from its services and digitally registered 92pc of the vital events in the nine months of the budget year, attributing the rest to people with disability.

According to Muzemil Hassen, system & database team leader at the Agency, the server is working beyond its capacity displaying information errors and delaying the process.

The one-line network known as Woredanet, which the agency shares with numerous city administration offices like the trade and revenue bureaus, is the additional justification for the lagging of services, according to Yosef.

Woredanet, the current government network, connects all the regional states and city administrations. In January 2019, the Ministry of Innovation & Technology planned to change the network with National Back Bone (NBB) with hopes of providing the public with fast and cost-effective service.

According to Yosef, the prolonged network failure pushed the Agency to eye installing its own network line, which is being tested across 38 woredas. He expects the new system to cut the service delivery time much shorter.

"Installing the infrastructure will take some time," said Yosef.