Addis Abeba Promises an ID Card in a Day, For Triple the Fee

Aug 1 , 2026. By FITSUM TADESSE ( FORTUNE STAFF WRITER )

Officials of the city administration are moving identity-card printing closer to where people live, promising a permanent card within one working day once a pilot is fully running. It would be a sharp turn from the three to five months residents have often waited. The Civil Registration & Residency Service Agency (CRRSA) has picked 22 wereda offices to test the approach. The speed may come at a price, as the card fee of 100 Br is expected to climb to about 300 Br.

The Addis Abeba City Administration is pushing identity-card printing closer to where people live, with its officials promising a permanent card within one working day once a pilot scheme is fully running.

The scheme would be a sharp turn from the three to five months residents have often waited. The Civil Registration & Residency Service Agency (CRRSA) has picked 22 wereda offices to test the approach.

However, the speed may come at a price. The card fee of 100 Br is expected to climb to about 300 Br as the Agency pays for printers and decentralised operations. The one-day promise also rests on machines and software that have yet to prove themselves at scale.

The old arrangement showed why the change was needed. Cards were printed at District offices and trucked out to the weredas, a round trip that took nearly three months. Later fixes cut the wait to about a week, but according to the Agency’s officials, the system still could not keep pace with demand.

The capital has 11 districts and 119 weredas where no less than 4.2 million residents are believed to live in; the Agency works at the wereda level to register identity cards, births and marriages.

Its officials set out the changes while presenting their annual performance report to the media on July 28, 2026, at their headquarters on Tunisia Road, near Addisu Gebeya.

The Agency’s Director General, Yoseph Nigussie, walked through progress in registration, digital residency, records and institutional reform.

The Agency delivered 2.4 million services to about 1.5 million residents in the 2025/26 fiscal year. It registered 500,363 vital events, from births and marriages to divorces, deaths and adoptions, through its head office, district and wereda branches, health institutions and courts.

Births made up the largest share, at 423,720. Of these, 117,449 children were registered within 90 days of birth. The Agency logged 37,149 marriages and 13,033 divorces. Of them, 4,994 were completed within the required period, while another 6,503 covered splits that had happened more than a year before they were recorded.

Death registrations reached 26,075, and the Agency registered 386 adoptions. One-stop registration at health institutions lets births and deaths be logged closer to where they occur, within the legal windows.

Beyond vital events, the Agency issued 643,825 digital resident identity cards during the year, a 22pc increase on the year before. It has scanned and indexed more than 12 million paper files through a document management system, and opened online channels for birth certificates and other services.

Working with the National ID Office, the Agency widened Fayda digital identity registration across weredas, districts and branches. It registered 1.8 million people during the year, taking the total through the system past eight million.

Yoseph disclosed that Addis Abeba had disbursed 4.2 million digital identity cards as of last week, lifting the total to five million. The cards need renewal every four years.

None of that, however, fixed the delay in producing permanent resident cards. According to Tigabu Shumey, the Agency's deputy director and vice director of vital-events resident service, rising demand and heavy reliance on temporary papers drove the decision to move printing to wereda offices.

"Many residents received temporary identification documents while waiting for their permanent cards, but some later failed to return and collect their original IDs," Tigabu told Fortune.

According to the Agency’s officials, the wereda offices selected for the pilot were chosen based on service demand and capacity. Under the new setup, the central office will focus on regulation, monitoring and auditing, while printing and distribution move nearer to residents.

The shift is carried out by the Civil Registration Vital Statistics Electronic Identification (cRVS-EID) system, built with the Ethiopian Artificial Intelligence Institute (EAII), which links registration records to card production. A dedicated printing and distribution department has been set up to run it.

The new hardware is meant to lift output sharply. The existing equipment could turn out about 250 cards a day, while the new machines can print about 750. The Administration bought two types, the Fargo HID and the Matica XID 8600, each valued at about 3,500 dollars.

City officials expect the added capacity to let most residents collect a permanent card within one working day once the system is fully live.

The fee, Tigabu argued, has to move with the service.

“Faster procedures, fewer needless delays and shorter queues would make the service more efficient,” he told Fortune. “The higher fee was needed to sustain the modernisation.”

Not everyone is convinced the design is complete. Rahel Abraham, deputy coordinator of Ethiopia's National ID Program (Fayda) and a card-issuance expert, urged officials to weigh card quality and payment as heavily as speed. According to her, because residents pay and the cards last up to four years, the materials and technology should keep them secure, functional and readable.

Rahel also questioned the separate payments for Fayda and kebele, or resident, cards, which she said could add extra costs. She proposed a single transaction while keeping the two systems' functions apart.

"Integrating the payments could reduce administrative duplication, improve efficiency and make identification services more coordinated and accessible to residents," she said.

The Agency has also tightened accountability. During the year, 105 people were held to account for misconduct and operational violations, among them 13 leaders, 78 employees and 14 others tied to investigated cases.

For residents, the test is whether the systems deliver the speed officials promise.

Hayat Abdurahman, 29, a resident of Nifas Silk-Lafto District, Wereda 01, welcomed the technology but was wary. Although she registered for a wereda ID two months ago, she has yet to be issued one.

"What matters to me isn’t the fee, but timely and quality service," Hayat told Fortune. "The technology is encouraging, but I worry if the system crashes or if the usual problems in public service centres return.”

PUBLISHED ON Aug 01,2026 [ VOL 27 , NO 1370]