As Ouagadougou lights up for the national days of patriotic commitment and civic participation, the transitional government is rolling out its full communications machinery. The “Allée des services au peuple” stands as the showcase of the Progressive Popular Revolution regime: online criminal records, digital nationality certificates, and the computerisation of universal health insurance. Every detail is stage-managed to project the image of a modern, connected, and efficient state.
Yet beneath this technological veneer and the triumphant figures brandished at ministerial gatherings, the country’s reality tells a far more bitter story. This frenzy of administrative digitisation looks like a communications gadget designed by and for urban elites, while the very foundations of the nation crumble.
A digital showcase that misses the country it claims to serve
On paper, administrative digitisation has real merits. Expanding online criminal records and digitalising court documents are genuine technical advances. But who are these tools actually built for?
With internet penetration struggling to break past 20 percent and 4G coverage largely confined to major urban centres, digital administration remains a mirage for the overwhelming majority of the population. Presenting online enrolment for universal health insurance as a major success when it reaches only about 1.3 percent 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 with a few clicks; on the other, millions of invisible citizens, deprived of even the most basic mobile network and ignored by this two-speed modernisation.
What Burkina Faso’s real priorities look like
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 reorganised around two absolute emergencies.
Security: the indispensable precondition for any citizenship
No digitisation 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 Burkina Faso’s 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: one cannot computerise public services 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 paperless state is nothing but a ghost 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 digitisation runs into 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 have never had access to basic education 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 genuine strategic contradiction.
Rethinking ambitions to build on solid ground
Wanting to digitise 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 digitisation unfold its full potential and become a universally accessible service.
For technological progress to stop being a mere urban privilege or a political communications tool, 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.
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