By Nanteza Ruth Walusimbi
NATIONAL
The National Identification and Registrations Authority (NIRA) has warned that if additional funding isn’t availed to complete the National Identity Card mass enrolment exercise, the current funds available will only take the agency up to October 2025.
NIRA warns that this shall jeopardize access to these services to the 5million Ugandans, since 13million people have been worked on, out of the 18million targeted.
Andrew Apedel, Senior Registration Officer in charge of Birth and Adoption made the revelation during the training of members of the Uganda Parliamentary Press Association (UPPA) during the International Identity Day, at NIRA head offices in Kololo on 16th September, 2025, where he was highlighting some of the challenges the Authority is facing during the ongoing mass enrolment exercise.
“When we talk about mass enrolment, we still have limitations in the financing of this exercise such that we’re able to penetrate each and every area in the country as fast as we would like for it to penetrate. We have a budget that runs until October and you can see that we’ve only done 13 million people, the target is 18million people. So, we need for government to extend this resource such that we can be able to reach the people that have not yet been reached,” said Apedel.
The Authority also decried the limited funding for civil registration activities with arguing that whereas there is mass enrolment of renewal of IDs, the same exercise isn’t accorded to civil registrations of births, deaths and civil marriages, despite the crucial role they play in society.
Christopher Kantinti, Director ICT at NIRA dismissed concerns that the issuance of printed National IDs is littered in segregation after reports emerged that MPs had received their IDs, and asked all Ugandans to be patient because so far, out of the 13million registered Ugandans, only 1.7IDs whose data was processed have been printed and are ready for issuance.
NIRA also provided an update on the mass enrolment exercise indicating that so far, the Authority has been able to renew more than 10.6 million national IDs that have expired, while about 2.3 million new registrations have been done and a big percentage of these registrations are actually children below 18years, while 237,317 first time IDs that are mostly under the category of a person who already had a NIN as a child and has come of age to receive a national ID service or a national ID card.
NIRA also revealed that it had carried out 13,000 corrections, thus bringing total number of Ugandans served to 13.231 million Ugandans from the time the mass enrolment exercise kicked off.
