As Ouagadougou glows with the colors of the national days of patriotic commitment and civic participation (JEPPC), the transitional government is rolling out its full communications machinery. The “Allée des services au peuple” stands as the ideal showcase for the regime of the Popular Progressive Revolution (RPP): online criminal records, digital nationality certificates, and the digitization of universal health insurance (AMU). Everything is staged to project the image of a modern, connected, and efficient state.
Yet behind this technological veneer and the triumphant figures paraded at ministerial grand ceremonies, the country’s reality delivers a far bitterer verdict. This frenzy of administrative dematerialization looks like a communications gadget designed by and for urban elites, while the very foundation of the nation crumbles.
A digital showcase disconnected from reality
Administrative dematerialization is not without merit on paper. The expansion of the online criminal record system or the digitization of judicial acts are undeniable technical advances. But for whom are these tools really designed?
With an internet penetration rate that struggles to cross the 20% mark and 4G coverage largely confined to major urban centers, digital administration is a mirage for the overwhelming majority of the population. Presenting online enrollment in the AMU as a major success when it reaches only about 1.3% of the population is 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 the most basic mobile network and ignored by this two-speed modernization.
The real priorities of the Burkinabè nation
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 must be reorganized around two absolute emergencies.
Security: the indispensable prerequisite for any citizenship
No dematerialization can flourish in a territory fragmented by insecurity. With more than two million internally displaced people who have fled terrorist violence, the urgency for the Burkinabè population is not to obtain a civil status document from a smartphone, but to survive, find shelter, and recover their land.
- Physical access before digital access: You cannot digitize public services in a commune under terrorist control or whose telecommunications infrastructure has been sabotaged.
- The right to life before the right to e-services: The absolute vital priority remains restoring territorial sovereignty and securing people and property. Without security, the dematerialized state is merely a specter 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 hits 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 have had no access to basic education is a systemic aberration.
- The schooling emergency: Thousands of schools remain closed because of the conflict. Investing massive financial and human resources in servers and virtual platforms while generations of Burkinabè 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 amounts to 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 requires a massive educational effort to give citizens the ability to read, understand, and interact with modern society. Only when this fundamental base is consolidated can dematerialization deploy its full potential and become a universally accessible service.
So that technological progress does not remain a mere urban privilege or a political communications tool, Burkina Faso must reinvest in the core of its sovereign missions: secure the territory to bring back peace, then educate the population to give it the means for autonomy.