A technological showcase far removed from daily life
As Ouagadougou lights up for the national days of patriotic engagement and citizen participation, the transitional government rolls out its full communications machinery. The “Allée des services au peuple” stands as the perfect display window for the regime of the Progressive Popular Revolution: online criminal records, digital nationality certificates, and the computerisation 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 brandished at ministerial gatherings, the country’s reality tells a far grimmer story. This frenzy of administrative dematerialisation looks like a communications gimmick designed by and for urban elites, while the very foundations of the nation crumble.
Digital tools that miss the people they claim to serve
Administrative digitalisation is not without merit on paper. Expanding online criminal records or digitising court documents are genuine technical advances. But who are these tools really built for?
With internet penetration struggling to cross the 20% mark and 4G coverage largely confined to major urban centres, digital administration remains a mirage for the vast majority of the population. Presenting online enrolment in universal health insurance as a major success when it reaches only about 1.3% of the population amounts to 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 modernisation.
What Burkina Faso actually needs to prioritise
For a state’s digitalisation 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 rebuilt around two absolute emergencies.
Security: the indispensable precondition for any citizenship
No dematerialisation can flourish in a territory torn apart 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 recover their land.
- Physical access before digital access: Public services cannot be digitised 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 dematerialised state is nothing but a spectre with no territorial anchor.
Education: the non-negotiable condition for digital inclusion
Even assuming security is restored and internet coverage is deployed across the entire territory, access to dematerialisation hits an insurmountable wall: illiteracy.
- The literacy divide: A major share of the population masters neither reading nor writing, let alone computer tools. Offering complex web platforms to citizens who never had access to basic schooling 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 Burkinabè children are denied school is a genuine strategic contradiction.
Rebuilding ambitions on solid ground
Wanting to digitalise 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 dematerialisation unfold its full potential and become a universally accessible service.
For technological progress to stop being a mere urban privilege or a tool of political communication, Burkina Faso must reinvest in the core of its sovereign missions: securing the territory to bring back peace, then educating the population to give it the means for its own autonomy.