At a moment when Ouagadougou is lit up for the National Days of Patriotic Commitment and Citizen Participation (JEPPC), the transitional government is rolling out its full communications apparatus. The “Avenue of Services to the People” stands as the ideal showcase of the Popular Progressive Revolution (RPP): online criminal records, digital nationality certificates, and the computerization 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 forces a far harsher verdict. This frenzy of administrative dematerialization looks like a communications gimmick designed by and for urban elites, while the very foundation of the nation is eroding.
A digital showcase out of touch with reality
Administrative dematerialization has merit on paper. Expanding online criminal records or digitizing judicial acts are undeniable technical advances. But for whom are these tools really designed?
With an internet penetration rate that struggles to clear 20% and 4G coverage largely confined to major urban centers, digital administration is a mirage for the vast majority of the population. Presenting online enrollment in the AMU 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 nation’s true priorities
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 precondition for any citizenship
No dematerialization can flourish in a territory fragmented 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: You do not 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 collides with 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 have had no 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 Burkinabe 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 once this fundamental base is consolidated can dematerialization unleash 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 bring back peace, then educating the population to give it the means for autonomy.
