Just over 1.3 million highly secure student ID cards are issued to all middle and high school students at almost 2,000 public and private schools across Ivory Coast every year since 2012.
Just over 1.3 million highly secure student ID cards are issued to all middle and high school students at almost 2,000 public and private schools across Ivory Coast every year since 2012. The student ID cards are printed at the Ministry of National Education & Technical and Professional Training with the plastic card personalization and printing systems from
Evolis.
Ivory Coast is the first African country to have introduced a student ID system. The cards enable the ministry to keep track of the school curriculum of every student, secure access to exam rooms, and produce reliable statistics on the number of students in real time. In short, the student ID card has become a way to certify that students are well and truly recognized in the national database.
Around 40 Dualys printing systems were installed at the ministry in early 2013 and have since been deployed by IBSF, an Evolis partner based in Ivory Coast. In 2017, IBSF ordered again 20 Primacy Duplex systems and 15
Primacy Lamination to round off the ministry’s fleet of printers. A specialist in computer engineering, IBSF developed the software interface of the systems, which makes it possible to personalize and print 30,000 cards per day between September and December of each year. At the start of every academic year and across the entire country, agents gather student enrollment data and take ID photos using about a hundred registration kits containing a computer and webcam. This data is then processed and synchronized on the ministry’s central server, and the ID cards are created and printed.
MINIMIZING IDENTITY FRAUD WITH ENCODED AND LAMINATED CARDS
The student ID cards contain the name and photo of the student and a QR code in which his or her personal details are encrypted. The cards are then laminated using the Evolis Primacy Lamination system and a hologram is added to ensure a high level of security. The risk of identity theft is therefore minimized.
Students receive their ID cards automatically after enrolling online and being accepted by one of the recognized institutions. No payment is required for this service.
Before the introduction of this ambitious project, student cards used to be printed directly by the individual schools, mostly on cardboard with few security elements. Given that this system was decentralized, the same ID number was sometimes issued twice and the cost of the cards varied from school to school.