Ethiopia’s National ID Program (NIDP), under the Office of the Prime Minister, has issued a tender for the supply and delivery of 20 million “pre-personalized secure resident identification cards,” positioning the procurement as part of the country’s wider Fayda digital ID rollout.
In the tender notice, NIDP says bids must be accompanied by a bid security of ETB 14,000,000 (or an equivalent amount in a freely convertible currency). The notice frames the requirement as a national-scale goods procurement focused on secure credential production and delivery, suggesting a significant expansion of physical ID issuance alongside Ethiopia’s digital identity infrastructure.
World Bank procurement documentation tied to the Ethiopia Digital ID for Inclusion and Services Project (P179040) includes an activity reference for this same card supply requirement, listed as ET-NIDP-499845-GO-RFB. In that procurement plan table, the activity is categorized under “Inclusive ID issuance,” with an estimated value of $9.5 million, and is described as an open international Request for Bids using a single-stage, two-envelope process.
The procurement is notable because it reinforces that Ethiopia’s national ID buildout is not only a digital enrollment and platform effort, but also a large-scale credential program with the operational realities of card issuance. On NIDP’s public-facing materials, Fayda is positioned as a national digital identification platform offering real-time biometric authentication and eKYC for a wide range of use cases. NIDP also describes an eKYC workflow for service providers that relies on Fayda identifiers requested through its portal.
The tender is a concrete signal of near-term demand for secure document production and logistics at scale, and an entry point into a national program that is being structured in parallel with broader platform integration and service-delivery objectives.
Sources: National ID Ethiopia, World Bank, World Bank, Fayda, Fayda
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By Ali Nassar-Smith
