The Democratic Republic of Congo’s DRC-Pass digital identification project moved into its first operational phase this September, with 50 registration agents completing a two-week training in Kinshasa under a ceremony presided over by Minister of Digital Economy Augustin Kibassa Maliba. The training, covering equipment use, personal data protection, operational traceability and the ethics of handling citizens’ records, produced the first cohort that will actually carry out field registration. Kibassa Maliba was careful to draw a boundary around what the system is: not a national identity card, not a replacement for civil registry services, but a single digital authenticator citizens can use to reach government services currently scattered across agencies with no shared login.
What that training day didn’t mention is who built the system, what it runs on, or what it cost, details that matter for understanding what DRC-Pass actually is. The project launched nationally on June 13 under President Félix Tshisekedi, built on a 20-year public-private partnership with Trident Digital Tech Holdings, a Nasdaq-listed, Singapore-based identity firm that serves as DRC-Pass’s exclusive eKYC provider. The platform runs on blockchain infrastructure Trident calls Tridentity and is designed around four services: biometric authentication tied to SIM registration, a single sign-on into government service portals, automated know-your-customer checks for banks and other financial institutions, and secure digital credentials alongside physical documents. The ambition is genuinely national in scale, targeting all of DRC’s roughly 110 million citizens and leaning on the country’s approximately 80 million existing mobile subscriptions to get a usable base of registered identities quickly. Reporting on the launch put the project’s cost at roughly $97.1 million, part of a broader $1 billion digital development push the government has mapped out through 2030. Singapore’s government publicly held the partnership up as a model of international collaboration in digital identity at the Africa-Singapore Business Forum in 2025, before the system had even gone live domestically.
That international polish sits against a domestic history DRC-Pass is clearly trying to outrun. In August 2024, the government cancelled a $1.2 billion national biometric ID contract with France’s Idemia and local partner Afritech, after Bloomberg and Lighthouse Reports investigations found the project’s cost had ballooned from an initial $360 million estimate amid allegations that funds were, in the investigations’ own characterization, leveraged to benefit a small number of elites rather than build the system as designed. Go back further and the pattern gets longer: the country’s last genuine national card issuance dates to 1984 through 1987 and was never fully implemented either, leaving generations of Congolese to navigate banking, formal employment and voting without reliable identification. DRC-Pass, in other words, is not a first attempt at solving this problem. It’s at least the third in four decades, and the second in three years alone.
What’s different this time, at least on paper, is the structure. A single long-term partner operating under a defined 20-year agreement is a different risk profile than a large upfront procurement contract of the kind that collapsed in 2024, and it puts an externally listed, publicly accountable company’s name directly on the outcome rather than a one-time vendor relationship. Kibassa Maliba has also been explicit that the rollout has to reach citizens outside Kinshasa and those with limited digital access from the start, framing digital transformation as something that must not create, in his words, a new distance between the state and the people. That’s the right thing to say about a country where connectivity and infrastructure thin out fast once you leave the capital, and it’s also exactly the commitment that proved hardest to keep during both the 1980s card scheme and the Idemia-era rollout.
The 50 agents trained this September are the first real test of whether that commitment holds. Their job over the coming months is to carry registration out into a country the size of Western Europe, and DRC-Pass’s eventual record will be written less by the training ceremony in Kinshasa than by whether its single identifier actually works at a bank counter or a government window in a province far from the capital, which is precisely where the country’s two previous attempts at this quietly stopped mattering.
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