As Ouagadougou stages its National Days of Patriotic Engagement and Citizen Participation, the transitional government rolls out its full communications machinery. The “Avenue of Services to the People” stands as the centerpiece showcase of the Progressive Popular Revolution regime: online criminal records, digital nationality certificates, and a digitized universal health insurance scheme. Every element is choreographed to project the image of a modern, connected, efficient state.
Yet beneath this technological veneer — and behind the triumphant figures brandished at ministerial gatherings — the country’s lived reality tells a far grimmer story. This rush toward paperless administration looks like a communications gimmick designed by and for urban elites, while the very foundations of the nation erode.
A showcase disconnected from the ground
On paper, administrative digitization has genuine merits. Expanding online criminal records and digitalizing court documents are real technical advances. But who are these tools actually built for?
With internet penetration struggling to cross the 20 percent mark and 4G coverage largely confined to major urban centers, digital administration amounts to a mirage for the vast majority of the population. Presenting online enrollment for universal health insurance as a major success — when it reaches only about 1.3 percent of the population — reflects a misleading political framing.
Worse still, this strategy deepens a harsh social divide. On one side stands a connected urban minority able to request documents in a few clicks. On the other, millions of invisible citizens lack even the most basic mobile network and are ignored by this two-speed modernization.
The nation’s true priorities
For a state’s digitization to carry meaning, the population must first have the minimum conditions of existence — and the cognitive and material capacity — to benefit from it. The order of national priorities needs to be rearranged around two absolute emergencies.
Security: the essential precondition for any citizenship
No digitalization can flourish on a territory fractured by insecurity. With more than two million internally displaced people who have fled terrorist violence, the urgent need for Burkinabè citizens 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: Public services in a commune under terrorist control — or whose telecommunications infrastructure has been sabotaged — cannot be digitized.
- 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 paperless state is no more than a specter without territorial roots.
Education: the prerequisite for digital inclusion
Even assuming security is restored and internet coverage extends across the entire country, access to digitalization collides with an impassable wall: illiteracy.
- The literacy divide: A major share of the population can neither read nor write, let alone use a computer. Offering complex web platforms to citizens who never had 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 deprived of school is a strategic contradiction.
Rethinking ambitions to build on solid foundations
Wanting to digitize 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 demands restoring security so people 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 once this fundamental base is consolidated can digitalization reach its full potential and become a universally accessible service.
For technological progress to avoid remaining a simple urban privilege or a political communications 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 of its own autonomy.