As Ouagadougou lights up for the national days of patriotic commitment and citizen participation, the transitional government is rolling out its full communications machinery. The “Alley of Services to the People” stands as the ideal showcase for the progressive popular revolution regime: online criminal records, digital nationality certificates, and the computerization of universal health insurance. Everything is staged to project the image of a modern, connected and efficient state.
Yet behind this technological veneer and the triumphant figures waved at ministerial gatherings, the country’s reality tells a far more bitter story. This frenzy of administrative dematerialization looks like a communications gadget designed by and for urban elites, while the very foundations of the nation erode.
A digital storefront that has lost touch with reality
Administrative dematerialization is not without merit on paper. Expanding online criminal records or digitizing judicial documents are undeniable technical advances. But who are these tools really designed for?
With internet penetration struggling to break past 20 percent and 4G coverage largely confined to major urban centres, digital administration remains a mirage for the overwhelming majority of the population. Presenting online enrollment in universal health insurance as a major success when it reaches only about 1.3 percent of the population amounts to a misleading political framing.
Worse still, this strategy deepens a violent social divide: on one side, a connected urban minority able to request documents in a few clicks; on the other, millions of invisible citizens, deprived of even the most basic mobile network and ignored by this two-speed modernization.
What Burkina Faso truly needs to prioritize
For a state’s digitalization to make sense, the population must first have the minimum conditions of existence and the cognitive and material capacities to benefit from it. The order of national priorities needs to be reorganized around two absolute emergencies.
Security: the indispensable precondition for any citizenship
No dematerialization can flourish in a territory fractured by insecurity. With more than two million internally displaced people who have fled terrorist violence, the urgent need of Burkina Faso’s population is not to obtain a civil status document from a smartphone, but to survive, find shelter and return to their land.
- Physical access before digital access: Public services cannot be digitized in a commune under terrorist control or whose telecommunications infrastructure has been sabotaged.
- The right to life before the right to an e-service: The absolute vital priority remains restoring territorial sovereignty and securing people and property. Without security, the dematerialized state is merely a spectre with no territorial anchor.
Education: the sine qua non of digital inclusion
Even assuming security is restored and internet coverage is deployed across the entire territory, access to dematerialization runs into an insurmountable wall: illiteracy.
- The literacy divide: A major share of the population masters neither reading nor writing, let alone computer tools (digital illiteracy). Offering complex web platforms to citizens who never had access to basic instruction is a systemic aberration.
- The schooling emergency: Thousands of schools remain closed because of the conflict. Pouring massive financial and human resources into servers and virtual platforms while generations of Burkinabe children are deprived of school is a genuine strategic contradiction.
Rethinking ambitions to build on solid foundations
Wanting to digitalize the administration before securing the country and educating its citizens is like painting the facade of a house whose foundations are collapsing.
The logical sequence of development first requires restoring security so that populations can live and produce on their territory. It then demands a massive educational effort to give citizens the ability to read, understand and interact with modern society. Only once this fundamental base is consolidated can dematerialization unfold its full potential and become a universally accessible service.
For technological progress to remain more than an urban privilege or a political communications tool, Burkina Faso must reinvest in the heart of its sovereign missions: securing the territory to restore peace, then educating the population to give it the means for its own autonomy.
