PRIME Minister Andrew Holness is expected to launch the technical pilot for the national identification system (NIDS) this week, which will involve a select number of Jamaicans going through the enrolment process to provide feedback to the Government.

Minister without portfolio in the Office of the Prime Minister Floyd Green, who made the disclosure, said, “The wide cross section of individuals who will include members of the disabled community, will give their evaluation “to say how [it went] and what were the challenges [if any].”

“We expect that we will run the pilot for probably about three months and then we think we should have sufficient feedback that we would roll out nationally,” he told the Jamaica Observer following his participation in a panel discussion on data privacy and security at the Tech Beach Jamaica event last Friday.

He noted that the pilot will operate out of the Central Sorting Office (CSO) on South Camp Road in Kingston, which will be the first of five pilot enrolment sites to be established.

“We have partnered with Jamaica Post to ensure that we utilise underutilised Government resources. So you are going to be seeing a lot of our enrolment sites are post offices that used to have good traffic but no longer do. [CSO] will be the site for the pilot until we build out more,” he said.

Green said “things are looking good for NIDS”, as Jamaicans are becoming more accepting of this technological revolution which will serve to make their lives easier. NIDS, which is voluntary, is intended to provide a safe, convenient and reliable means of verifying an individual’s identity.

“I think COVID really showed people that whether or not we want to appreciate it or not, technology is here to stay and we are moving deeper into the age of technology so more and more people had to embrace technology, people who never interacted with a Zoom platform, a virtual meeting, downloaded Zoom on their phone and started to see technology as a tool for efficiency,” he said.

Added Green: “We have sent out people into the field to gather data about knowledge, values, beliefs in relation to NIDS and we are seeing an uptick in favourability for the programme.”

Green said he thinks people will appreciate having a system “where you don’t have to have multiple IDs to achieve business goals in Jamaica; we have a system where if you have your NIDs, it will get you through quicker”.

Further, Green said for people who are still sceptical, a communication campaign will be rolled out starting in January, “where we will answer some of the questions, we will speak about privacy, we will speak about security, we will dispel some of the myths — we are only taking photographs, fingerprints, and signature, that’s it”.

NIDS is being promoted as a comprehensive and secure structure to enable the capture and storage of personal identity information for citizens and people ordinarily resident in Jamaica. The system will establish a reliable database of all Jamaican citizens and will involve the issuance of a unique lifelong national identification number (NIN) to every person. In the long term, the NIN may be used alongside a multi-purpose card, or be uploaded onto smart phones. This will become the primary source for identity assurance and verification, and is expected to result in improved governance and management of social, economic and security programmes.

It is expected that NIDS will be rolled out to the general public in 2023.

– Additional reporting by Josimar Scott