Malawi has launched the National Registration Bureau’s Strategic Plan 2025–2030, a blueprint to achieve SDG 16.9 by delivering legal identity for all through a sustainable, digitally enabled Civil Registration and Vital Statistics system. The plan shifts focus from top-down mass enrollment to bottom-up permanence, aiming to record every birth, marriage, and death and to integrate new registrations directly into the national register.
This second-phase strategy builds on the 2017 mass registration campaign that rapidly expanded national ID coverage and helped enable downstream policies such as SIM registration enforcement. For background on how Malawi’s ID system has been leveraged in adjacent sectors, see ID Tech’s coverage of the country’s SIM registration deadline and telecom compliance efforts, which illustrates how foundational ID rails underpin digital policy execution. Malawi’s SIM registration deadline.
Officials are also preparing for a mobile-first future. Following a successful pilot, authorities plan a nationwide rollout of a Digital ID Wallet by 2026 to reduce card production costs and capitalize on rising smartphone use while maintaining strong enrollment and verification at the NRB. Related Malawi coverage.
Sources: UNDP Malawi
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
