The failure of the “single source of truth about Kenyans”: the National Digital Registry System, collateral mysteries and the Safaricom monopoly

A paper published by Keith Breckenridge on 23 August 2017 exploring the recent failure of an elaborate biometric registration scheme, the National Digital Registry System, in Kenya. The paper shows that the Kenyan and South African economies are closely linked in their obsessions with biometric identification registration, and financialisation, but it also draws out the particular significance, in the Kenyan case of a conflict over the form and ownership of credit information as collateral.