“The UNHCR reports that as many as 3,000 people a day are being processed through the registration program.”
The UN refugee agency’s biggest biometric registration project yet is now underway, and it appears to be a hit among the inhabitants of Uganda’s Oruchinga Refugee Settlement.
The UNHCR reports that as many as 3,000 people a day are being processed through the registration program. A team of UNHCR, government, and volunteer staff work together to collect refugees’ fingerprint and iris biometrics, which can then be encoded in an ID that can be used to receive protection and assistance from United Nations and government authorities.
Residents of the refugee settlement appears to have recognized the importance of the biometric ID program immediately, with the UHCR reporting that hundreds of refugees arrived at the registration center at dawn on the day of the program’s launch. And for their part, the UNHCR and its partners have raced to get the registration program up and running. As one field officer remarked to a UN reporter about the new biometric registration center, “To see it go from an empty football field to this has been amazing.”
Frantic though the pace may have been, the Uganda project appears to be on track to serve as a flagship example of the benefits of biometric technology now being realized by the UNHCR and other refugee agencies as they seek to help some of the world’s most vulnerable populations.
Source: UNHCR
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March 23, 2018 – by Alex Perala
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