As Ouagadougou lights up for the national days of patriotic commitment and civic participation, the transitional government rolls out its full communications machinery. The “Allée des services au peuple” stands as the ideal showcase for the regime: digital criminal records, online nationality certificates, and the digitalization 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 brandished at ministerial gatherings, the country’s reality tells a far grimmer story. This frenzy of administrative dematerialization looks like a communication 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 digital criminal record and the digitization of judicial documents are undeniable technical advances. But who are these tools really designed for?

With internet penetration struggling to cross the 20% threshold and 4G coverage largely confined to major urban centers, digital administration is a mirage for the vast majority of the population. Presenting online AMU registration 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 needs to be reorganized around two absolute emergencies.

Security: the indispensable prerequisite for any citizenship

No dematerialization can flourish on a territory fractured by insecurity. With more than two million internally displaced people fleeing terrorist violence, the urgent need of the Burkinabè 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: 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 never had 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 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 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.

For technological progress to remain more than an urban privilege or a political communication tool, Burkina Faso must reinvest in the core of its sovereign missions: securing the territory to restore peace, then educating the population to give it the means for its autonomy.

By Yacouba Ouédraogo — Journalist