More than 3.6 million eligible Papua New Guineans have yet to register for a national identity card. The National reported the figure from the 2026 PNG National Research Institute Chairman’s Seminar in Lae, where Administrative Services Minister Richard Masere set out the government’s voting timeline.
Biometric Update, reporting from the same seminar, said trials are expected to continue through 2027, with broad biometric and electronic voting targeted by 2032.
In a statement issued by the Department of Prime Minister and National Executive Council, Prime Minister James Marape told Parliament the goal was “a reliable biometric or ID-based voting system in place by 2027.” He said 2026 would be used to clean the common roll against national census data.
ID Tech reported that the 2027 trial targets the seven Highlands provinces, the National Capital District, Popondetta and one or two additional urban districts. The same report said the project is not a commitment to conduct the entire 2027 general election electronically. EMTV Online reported Masere telling delegates that the Electoral Commission, as a constitutional office, holds the mandate to determine whether the country is prepared.
The registration arithmetic
Masere told The National in March that 4.2 million of the country’s 10.1 million people had been registered under the National Identification project, or 40 per cent. He said the project had run for 10 years. By July, The National reported registrations had reached 4.3 million under a restructured PNG Civil and Identity Registry. Biometric Update framed the same shortfall against the voting population, reporting that 3.6 million of PNG’s 5.9 million eligible voters sit outside the national ID system. That is 100,000 registrations across four months.
On Exepreneur’s own arithmetic from those two ministerial figures, holding that pace constant, closing a 3.6 million gap takes roughly twelve years. Full coverage would arrive near 2038. Four months is a thin base for a projection, and the registry has said capacity is being expanded.
Biometric Update reported that the PNG Civil and Identity Registry partnered with Santos to provide 120 biometric mobile registration kits for the NID programme across the country. Masere told The National the government would add up to 400 mobile registration kits and increase manpower from 700 to 1,200 for 2025, and said the registry would deliver 4.6 million registrations. Registrations stood at 4.3 million eighteen months later.
In a statement reported by The National, PNG Civil and Identity Registry acting registrar-general Salome Bogosia-Keari said more than 1.3 million NID cards had been printed and 450,000 collected. She said 2.6 million birth certificates had been printed and 970,000 collected. Roughly one in three printed cards has reached the person named on it. Bogosia-Keari described “a significant backlog of over a million files to process, print and issue” in the same statement, and said it would require additional funding support.
A card sitting uncollected in a provincial office is not an identity credential. It is inventory. A voter who was registered but never issued cannot present a card at a polling booth, which is the specific failure a biometric roll exists to prevent.
Bogosia-Keari told Biometric Update the Civil Identity Registry Act 2024 mandates registration of births, deaths, marriages, adoptions, divorces and legitimisation, and reinforces governance through biometric verification and inter-agency data sharing with the Electoral Commission and the National Statistical Office.
The funding gap runs in both directions
Acting Electoral Commissioner Margaret Vagi told The National: “We submitted a request for K404 million but only received K50 million.” She confirmed the provinces had received their share of that K50 million. In a separate report by The National, Marape confirmed the K50 million appropriated in the 2026 National Budget had been released, and said Vagi was expected to complete a full report on its usage.
Answering East Sepik Governor Allan Bird in Parliament, Marape said “This Government will not under-resource the Electoral Commission,” according to The National. The paper reported Bird put his question on GE27 preparedness with 11 months remaining before the issue of writs.
Biometric Update reported in March that money intended for the biometric fingerprinting and voter verification system had yet to be made available. Vagi said at the time that consultations were far advanced, with the goal of introducing the system mostly in Highlands provinces during the 2027 election.
Then-ICT Minister Timothy Masiu said in April 2025 that “SevisPass has faced funding challenges in 2024, including a K7 million budget shortfall,” in remarks reported by Biometric Update. He appealed for Digital ID investment to be prioritised as national digital public infrastructure.
The Development Policy Centre calculated that the NID had taken more than K40 million a year on average over a decade to register 3.3 million people. It described the K60 million allocated in the 2025 national budget as a pittance against registering the rest of the population. The National reported Bogosia-Keari saying in a December statement that K80 million had been allocated for the year’s work.
Identity registration draws K80 million this year. A general election draws K50 million against a K404 million submission. Biometric voter verification has drawn nothing at all. The election date is fixed by constitutional requirement, and every input the reform depends on is funded annually and at the government’s discretion.
What the ministers are arguing about
Under questioning in Parliament, Masere said the NID programme was “created out of political convenience, created outside of the Constitution,” while denying it was a failed project, The National reported. The same report noted Hiri Koiari MP Keith Iduhu telling the sitting that the programme had reached less than 10 per cent of the population.
Iduhu’s figure and Masere’s 40 per cent cannot both describe the same thing, and Exepreneur found no published methodology behind either. Iduhu appears to be counting issued cards, which at 1.3 million printed and 450,000 collected lands nearer his estimate. Masere is counting registrations. Both positions are defensible on their own terms and produce a fourfold difference in national coverage.
Biometric Update reported that Jiwaka Governor Simon Kaiwi challenged Masere in Parliament over the state of the electoral roll. Kaiwi asked why thousands of newly eligible 18-year-olds remained unregistered, warning the issue threatens local-level government elections and the 2027 National General Elections. The same report said Masere defended his ministry’s reform agenda but stopped short of committing to a firm timetable.
The National reported that in July, Aitape-Lumi MP Anderson Mise questioned the 2026 National Budget allocation for rolling out the NID project in districts and provinces, and North Fly MP James Donald asked whether the NID office was fully functioning. Masere told the House he could not provide an update on operations in Aitape-Lumi.
In a separate report by The National, Electoral Commissioner Simon Sinai said updated population data was fundamental to any election, and that a lack of such data over the years had caused many issues in updating the roll.
The denominator nobody agrees on
Masere’s 40 per cent uses a population of 10.1 million. A December 2022 United Nations report drawing on a University of Southampton survey using satellite imagery and ground-truthing suggested a figure near 17 million, roughly double the official estimate. The UN revised that to 11.8 million in July 2023.
On Exepreneur’s calculation, 4.3 million registrations is 43 per cent of 10.1 million, 36 per cent of 11.8 million and 25 per cent of the discarded 17 million figure.
PNG Haus Bung reported that under the electoral reform agenda, data from the NID and the national census will be integrated to create a reliable electronic electoral roll before the 2027 General Elections. Two datasets that disagree on how many people exist will not reconcile into a single roll by 2027 because a policy document instructs them to.
The digital layer arrived on schedule
ID Tech reported that Marape introduced SevisPass and the SevisWallet identity wallet on 24 November at the Digital Transformation Summit 2025. The launch followed the government’s endorsement of the National Digital Identity Policy 2025, developed by the Department of Information and Communications Technology.
Biometric Update reported the system was built by Tech5 on its T5-OmniTrust platform, and includes T5-Cryptograph decentralised digital ID technology. The same report said SevisPass and the wallet were piloted towards the end of the previous year. Biometric Update also reported the government intended to roll out the SevisPass Digital ID and Trust Framework over 18 months, with a six-month stabilisation period following, covering minimum viable products for SevisPass, SevisWallet, SevisPortal, SevisAdminPortal and SevisDEx.
In a GovInsider article co-authored by DICT programme lead Jessy Sereke, MiBank is described as letting customers open an account in under 15 minutes using SevisPass within SevisWallet, with no paper forms and no branch visit. The article puts the number of eligible Papua New Guineans who remain unbanked at more than 4.5 million.
Biometric Update reported in May that ICT Minister Peter Tsiamalili Jr. said the SevisWallet app is available on the iOS App Store and Google Play. The same report said issuers, verifiers and relying partners were expected to align their systems and compliance pathways by July 2026, covering eKYC, SIM registration and secure onboarding. That deadline has passed. Exepreneur found no published integration figures measured against it, and no record of the question being put to a minister.
DICT’s own statement on the nationwide data integration exercise lists support for biometric identity verification at the 2027 National General Elections among its objectives. The statement also names consent-based eKYC verification, faster access to banking and SIM registration, and single sign-on across government systems.
A credential issued in seconds reaches only people already in the database. The 3.6 million outside it gain nothing.
What worked, at a scale of 2,500
The Asian Development Bank reported that it implemented the Digital Bank ID Card pilot with the Bank of Papua New Guinea. The pilot helped more than 2,500 individuals in remote and rural areas secure ID through biometric capture, and produced an e-KYC framework and the first regulatory sandbox in the Pacific region.
ADB’s digital sandbox record states the solution was pilot-tested from December 2022 to March 2023 with over 2,500 registrations. It followed two ADB missions in 2018 that examined whether emerging technologies could improve financial and social inclusion despite limited connectivity and electricity.
Biometric Update, citing Digizen chief executive Kimmo Koivisto, reported that officers from MiBank and MamaBank used a tablet-based enrolment system that works offline to capture face and fingerprint biometrics. Identities were confirmed by a local community authority such as a village chief, cutting confirmation from “months to minutes.”
Biometric Update reported Bogosia-Keari citing poor infrastructure, difficult geography, severe weather, misinformation, staffing shortages and low awareness as barriers to NID registration, and saying offline processing continues daily while backlogs persist. The ADB pilot ran offline, verified identity through community authority and issued on the spot.
It ran three years ago at a scale of 2,500 against a national gap of 3.6 million, and has not been scaled into the foundational system.
Where the baseline sits
Business Advantage PNG, reporting on the GSMA study co-authored by Amanda H A Watson, said about 80 per cent of PNG’s population does not have access to a clear form of identification. The same report said that against a target of 1.5 million national IDs by the end of 2018, only about 500,000 people had been registered.
Measured against that 2019 baseline, registrations have multiplied roughly eightfold.
The Development Policy Centre noted that the then-responsible minister announced a goal of registering 95 per cent of the population by 16 September 2025, and that the Prime Minister subsequently issued a directive to register 100 per cent of citizens. Coverage on the government’s own denominator stands at 43 per cent.
The next twelve months
The National reported that Governor-General Sir Bob Dadae gazetted Vagi’s acting appointment effective 20 November 2025 for a period of six months, and that Marape then authorised an advertisement for the position with applications due by 19 December 2025. When the six-month term lapsed, Marape told Parliament the acting appointment would be extended until a permanent commissioner was appointed. Opposition Leader James Nomane, a member of the appointments committee established under Section 6 of the Organic Law on National and Local Level Government Elections, said the matter had yet to be resolved. The same report noted Vagi had conducted the Dei Open and New Ireland Regional by-elections.
RNZ reported in July that Marape announced Nicole Haley as electoral commissioner, the first foreigner to hold the post. Haley is a professor of anthropology and Pacific politics at the Australian National University with more than 30 years researching PNG’s political and governance systems. She replaced Vagi, acting commissioner since November.
A commentary published in The National argued the decision reflects a perceived lack of confidence in local professionals who have long served within the commission. It questioned whether a new commissioner could absorb PNG’s cultural contexts, languages and regional election practices with less than a year before polling preparations intensify.
Transparency International PNG issued a campaign statement in Port Moresby on 22 May calling for accuracy and transparency in the electoral roll ahead of GE27. It urged citizens to visit their provincial electoral office or designated ward registration booth to check their enrolment, using material developed with the PNG Electoral Commission. The commission is asking voters to close a data gap the state has not closed since 2014.
The National reported from the Lae seminar that the government has begun studying biometric voting systems used in India and the Philippines, and is considering hybrid models that combine digital verification with paper audit trails. Masere put the case plainly at that seminar, telling delegates, per EMTV Online, that “biometric and electronic voting is the way forward.”
Four figures decide whether 2032 holds, and the government has published none of them: the monthly registration rate, the card collection rate, any second tranche against the Electoral Commission’s K404 million submission, and the result of the July 2026 SevisPass integration deadline. Masere’s own numbers put registration growth at 100,000 in four months. That pace puts a complete national database in 2038.
