Nigeria’s National Youth Service Corps is implementing a biometric attendance tracking system to ensure that its members are working when and where their duties have been assigned. The system will rely on thumbprint scanning for member authentication.
The NYSC performs an important duty in the country, having been established to help the country heal after the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s by bringing youths together in service to their country. Unfortunately, there are occasionally cases in which members falsify their activity records and skip their assigned service, in some cases getting help from more senior NYSC staff; according to its Director-General, Brig.-Gen. Johnson Olawumi, there are curently six staff members facing expulsion from the service for this reason. The biometric attendance tracking will help to put an end to such schemes, starting in the cities of Lagos and Abuja and expanding across the rest of the country next year.
The move is part of a larger trend that has seen biometric attendance tracking spread in government and business applications around the world. India’s government, which is perhaps the world leader in adopting biometric technologies, is increasingly using biometric attendance tracking for its own government officials; meanwhile, in the business world, deployments range from a Mexican bakery chain to a Dutch temp agency.
Source: allAfrica
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September 4, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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